Zooming with Jo Dyer in the week before her final Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) was a masterclass in multitasking. In the time we talked there were emails from cancelling authors, phone calls she acknowledged but didn’t answer and, that staple of working from home, a knock at the door from an unexpected road worker. Throughout all this, Dyer remained calm, yet excited about the festival she launched on Saturday.
That ability to lean into change is a hallmark of Dyer’s career with a CV that includes a period as General Manager of Bangarra and as Artistic Director of Sydney Theatre Company under Robyn Nevin then Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton. Not to mention her stint as CEO of Sydney Writers Festival, and somewhere in the mix she has also been a producer on two films (Lucky Miles and Girl Asleep). But she became best known for her role in the rape allegations against Christian Porter, where she took a principled stand to legally challenge the Liberal’s former attorney general and was awarded damages. And this all played out as she was running 2020’s AWW.
