Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) today unveiled its program for 2026, its fortieth anniversary, with more than 150 artists appearing across the city in May.
Under the theme Visions & Revisions, this year’s program sees writers, thinkers and storytellers from across Australia and the world explore the futures we imagine, the stories we carry, and the revisions – personal and collective – that define us.
The MWF Opening Night on 6 May will feature original readings and performances responding to this theme by Omar Musa, Don Watson, Ariana Reines and Sophia Brous, plus the announcement of The Age Book of the Year Awards.
Kicking off the festival weekend on 7 May, former Prime Minister of Aotearoa New Zealand Jacinda Ardern (NZ) sits down with Virginia Trioli at Melbourne Town Hall, offering her global perspective on leadership in times of crisis.
In a headline double billing, internationally bestselling novelist R. F. Kuang (USA) will also appear at Melbourne Town Hall that same evening. The hugely popular author behind Yellowface and Babel will discuss her latest novel Katabasis, the perils and power structures of academia, and the power of speculative fiction.
Activist, historian and author Tony Birch will deliver the 2026 MWF Closing Night Address on 10 May, sharing a meditation on the ethics of reading and writing, and the responsibility that comes with creative freedom. Drawing on stories and poetry by First Nations and other writers, Birch considers how literature fosters empathy across difference, and what it means to read and write with courage and an ethical imagination.
In curating the 2026 program, MWF Festival Director Veronica Sullivan is joined by local First Nations Curators Evelyn Araluen, Anita Heiss and Daniel James, who each bring their own distinct creative vision to the festival line-up.
And in an MWF first, a cohort of Canadian First Nations writers appear across the festival in a series of events co-curated by Araluen and nêhiyaw writer JessicaJohns, presented in partnership with the Toronto International Festival of Authors, which will in turn host Australian First Nations storytellers in Canada later this year.
Sullivan said: ‘Since 1986, MWF has been shaped and sustained by countless visions. Whether contributing as artists, audiences, volunteers or supporters – many hands, hearts, pens and minds have forged the festival’s legacy.’
MWF 2026: international highlights
Acclaimed British novelist David Szalay (UK), winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, joins Michael Williams to unpack Flesh – a propulsive, hypnotic novel tracing one man’s life from isolated adolescence in Hungary to precarious adulthood in London.
Man Booker Prize-winning author Yann Martel (Canada), best known for the modern classic Life of Pi, returns to Australia for the first time in a decade to unveil his much-anticipated new novel Son of Nobody. The book follows a present-day classicist whose research uncovers a lost account of the Trojan War told from the perspective of an ordinary soldier, pairing the epic text with contemporary commentary in a powerful meditation on love, grief, life and death.
Susan Choi (USA) arrives with Flashlight, her 2025 Booker Prize–shortlisted novel, a sweeping generational saga that begins with a father’s mysterious disappearance and unfolds into a tender family portrait and gripping geopolitical thriller set against the shifting tides of the 20th century.
Scottish poet and writer Michael Pedersen travels to Melbourne to sit down with his close friend Grace Tame for a discussion about his debut novel Muckle Flugga and its themes of memory, landscape and language.
Palestinian scholar and writer Tareq Baconi (UK) will share his searing and deeply personal memoir Fire in Every Direction, a book in which a love story, political awakening and queer self-discovery converge across three generations of displacement.
International Booker Prize-shortlistee Mieko Kawakami, widely hailed as one of Japan’s finest contemporary novelists and author of Breasts and Eggs and Heaven, will present her latest work: Sisters in Yellow, a noir-tinged tale of friendship, found family, and the injustices women face.
International bestselling poet Nikita Gill (UK), meanwhile, brings her lyrical, fiercely feminist voice to MWF, presenting her new novel in verse Hekate: The Witch – a coming-of-age retelling of Greek myth that resurrects the long-silenced goddess of magic and the underworld, tracing her journey from isolated childhood to world-commanding power.
MWF 2026: local highlights
Journalist and human rights advocate Antoinette Lattouf presents Women Who Win, a fierce, unflinching celebration of women who defied expectations, shattered barriers and rewrote the rules without asking permission. Lattouf is joined by one of the book’s subjects, activist and former Australian of the Year Grace Tame, for a conversation about defiance, resilience and what it truly costs to speak out.
Celebrate the ultimate kitchen bible this Mother’s Day with Stephanie Alexander: 30 Years of The Cook’s Companion. Since its first 1996 release, Stephanie Alexander’s definitive guide has become the heart of the Australian home. Three decades on, the iconic author and philanthropist joins Alice Zaslavsky to reflect on her extraordinary legacy and the recent reissue of her masterpiece.
One year on from the Federal Election, it’s time to take stock with the MWF Political Year in Review. What’s the state of our national political climate and of the major and minor parties? Expect frank and informed commentary from Sean Kelly, Amy Remeikis, Don Watson and host Barrie Cassidy.
Two of Australia’s most thrilling crime writers come together to discuss their latest books: Dervla McTiernan tells a gripping, high-stakes tale of a woman’s disappearance and three seemingly unconnected people caught in a lethal web of deceit in Three Reasons for Revenge; and Benjamin Stevenson channels the golden age of mystery writing with a tightly wound whodunnit featuring heists, hostages and plot twists you’ll never see coming in Everyone in This Bank is a Thief.
