A real page-turner

Australian author Carol Lefevre  

Held in a series of temporary marquees erected in Adelaide’s Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, Adelaide Writers’ Week is Australia’s largest and best-respected literary event.

“It has always been considered the country’s most significant writers’ festival,” says Rose Wight OAM, Executive Producer of Adelaide Writers’ Week (and also Executive Producer of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas).

“Every festival has a literary festival now, but Adelaide is unique in its location, and that it remains the only major literary festival that’s free. And like the Adelaide Festival, we were the first. And the biennial nature, the longer preparation time, the quality of the list of writers who are attending, I think all of those things make it a significant, if not the most significant literary festival in Australia.”

Despite occasional doleful claims about ‘the death of the novel’ in recent years, Wight believes that people are hungrier than ever for literary events.

“People want to see, and enjoy seeing, writers they have loved for many years or are just discovering them; and hear them talk about how they write and why they write.”

Certainly audiences at Adelaide Writers’ Week continue to grow. Whereas the 2008 event attracted an estimated 107,000 over six days, this year’s Writers’ Week is expected to pull in some 110,000 people.

“It certainly is not diminishing. We’re struggling to fit the people on our site who want to attend,” Wight says.

This year’s Writers’ Week program, which celebrates the life and writing of Queensland poet Thomas Shapcott, features 62 writers, including Australians Michelle de Kretser, Robert Dessaix, Chloe Hooper and Sam Wagan Watson alongside international guests such as Richard Dawkins (England), Manju Kapur (India), Cristovâo Tezza (Brazil) and Irvine Welsh (Scotland).

Visiting writers will participate in more than 70 sessions, ranging from book launches and ‘meet the author’ sessions, to panels about memoir, crime writing and passion.

“This year we are bringing together a particularly solid group of overseas writers representing Europe, Asia and the Americas, while the Australian contingent will be as strong as ever. For the round tables there are some intriguing topics for writers to discuss. All in all, a week to look forward to,” John Coetzee, Chair of the Adelaide Writers’ Week Advisory Committee, said in a statement.

One person who is definitely looking forward to this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week is South Australian Carol Lefevre, whose 2007 novel Nights in the Asylum was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book. Her second novel, If You Were Mine, was published by Vintage in 2008.

“It’s the first time for me at Adelaide Writers’ Week,” Lefevre tells Arts Hub.

“For a writer – especially if you’re a South Australian writer – it’s always a great ambition to appear at the Writers’ Week, because when you’re learning, when you’re starting out, you spend so much time there every couple of years, hanging out and listening to other writers, hearing what they’ve got to say, learning; and you always hope that one of these days you’ll be lucky enough to be asked to be there. And it’s happened this year for me, which is just fantastic.

“It’s nail-biting but also something to look forward to, and I’m sure it will be an exciting experience.”

Lefevre will be appearing in two sessions at Writers’ Week: a ‘Meet the Author’ session on Wednesday March 3, and a panel discussion, ‘Bleak Houses’ (“About the places fiction takes you to.”) on Friday March 5, alongside UK crime writer Philip Kerr, Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh, and Australian novelist Markus Zusak.

“I’m really looking forward to the panel, and so interested to hear what the others have to say on the subject,” she says.

“We’ll be discussing the darker side of fiction – where we’re coming from when we write it – have we got a responsibility to cheer people up and not depress them? All sorts of ideas I’m sure are going to come out in that panel.”