We're super excited to once again be partnering with Better Read Than Dead to bring you the Newtown Festival Writer's Tent!
Better Read Than Dead is a literary landmark that has thrived in the heart of Newtown's King Street for over two decades, nourishing the neighbourhood with a specially curated collection of books and regular author and community events.
This team of dedicated book lovers have kindly donated their time and expertise to deliver you a program that brings together some of Australia's leading writers that will delight adults and children alike!
Better Read Than Dead is a literary landmark that has thrived in the heart of Newtown's King Street for over two decades, nourishing the neighbourhood with a specially curated collection of books and regular author and community events.
This team of dedicated book lovers have kindly donated their time and expertise to deliver you a program that brings together some of Australia's leading writers that will delight adults and children alike!
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11:20am | Story Time with the Gruffalo
The Gruffalo will once more be visiting the deep dark wood of Camperdown Memorial Rest Park to join us for story time! We will be reading and re-enacting The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo’s Child by Julia Donaldson, then kids and families are welcome to meet the friendly Gruffalo and participate in some fun activities. |
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11:40am | Anthony Puharich and Libby Travers talk Meat
It’s no secret that Australians love meat — per capita, we are one of the biggest meat-consuming nations in the world. However we are also increasingly aware of the effects our massive meat consumption has on our animals, our environment and our health. Anthony Puharich, a fifth-generation butcher in Sydney and supplier to the vast majority of Australia’s leading restaurants has teamed up with Libby Travers, accomplished food writer and advocate for sustainable food production to share their wealth of knowledge with us in the comprehensive Meat: The Ultimate Companion. As they walk us through the topic from the perspective of the farmer, the butcher and the best Australian cooks, we learn all the vital questions we should be asking before buying our meat and understand what is required for a producer to meet the high standards we should be adopting. Anthony Huckstep will be sitting down with Anthony and Libby to chair this discussion on their important work and the history behind it. Anthony Huckstep is a national restaurant critic, co-author of The Australian Fish and Seafood Cookbook, and writer for Delicious, QANTAS, GQ, The Australian, Food Service and Buro/24. As Anthony Bourdain has written in the foreword to Meat, 'You hold the right book in your hands. Learning from it will be delicious.' |
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12:20pm | Greg Fleet, The Good Son
Greg Fleet’s work in comedy across TV, film, radio and theatre, and the honesty with which he speaks about his long-term drug addiction, has made him one of the most respected, beloved and in-debt stand-up comics around. Now he has brought the same knack for storytelling and observation that has made his stand up so popular to his debut novel, The Good Son. The Good Son explores love and fear and relationships and family; how people fulfill each other’s needs, sometimes unexpectedly. It also looks a how we treat the elderly people in our lives in this modern age. Greg has written a beautiful story with the belief that ‘beautiful stories can only make the world a better place.’ Join us as we sit down with Greg to discuss his first foray into fiction. |
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1:00pm | Bad Women: Meg Mason, Lauren Sams and Holly Wainright
Female characters are often labelled unlikable or problematic purely for being three-dimensional. We have gathered together some of Sydney’s finest female authors, all of whom have featured fantastically flawed female protagonists in their novels to celebrate women who, as Koa Beck described in The Atlantic, ‘challenge the institutions and practices frequently used to measure a woman’s value: marriage, motherhood, divorce, and career.’ Meg Mason writes monthly columns for ELLE and is the Ask Megsy columnist for InsideOut. Her career began at the Financial Times and The Times of London and her work has since appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, The New Yorker, Stellar, Russh, Grazia and Cosmopolitan. She had served as the managing editor of Sunday magazine and as GQ’s female-affairs correspondent. She is the author of Say It Again In a Nice Voice, a memoir of motherhood and the novel You Be Mother. Lauren Sams is the features director at ELLE and has written for Cosmopolitan, Girlfriend, marie claire, Sunday Style and the Sydney Morning Herald. She is the author of She’s Having Her Baby and Crazy Busy Guilty, both of which unpack the realities modern parenting and womanhood with candour, humour and warmth. Holly Wainwright has had a long career as a journalist and editor, originally in travel and celebrity magazines and now online. She's been working in digital media for three years, most recently as Head of Entertainment at Mamamia. She is the author of two satirical novels about motherhood and social media,The Mummy Bloggers and How to Be Perfect. If you love bad women as much as we do, join us for a chat in the Writer’s Tent. You can also join our monthly Bad Women Book Club, held in-store at Better Read Than Dead on the third Wednesday of each month and hosted by Lauren Sams. |
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1:40pm | Paul Ham, New Jerusalem: Judgement Day 1535
Former Sunday Times correspondent Paul Ham has become one of Australia’s most renowned 20th century history writers for his keen attention to detail and his driving interest in human rights. Now he’s delving much further back in time, all the way to one of the first violent revolts of the Reformation which, together with the Peasants’ War of 1524-25, helped to ignite 110 years of religious conflict. New Jerusalem: Judgement Day 1535 is a story of religious obsession and persecution, of noble ideals trampled to dust, of slavish sexual surrender — all in the name of Christ. The 500-year-old story holds a terrible fascination in our own time, scarred again by the return of religious wars, of hatred and slaughter, all in the name of a god or a faith. This is a discussion history buffs will not want to miss out on. Join us as we sit down with Paul to immerse ourselves into this particularly violent time in human history and gain new insight into our present situation. |
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2:20pm | Ken Saunders and Jeff Sparrow talk Politics
Australian and global politics have, to borrow the subtitle of local novelist Ken Saunders’ debut, gone to hell in a handbasket. Fortunately there are countless writers who have been galvanised by the current state of affairs to use their craft to dissect the status quo and propose a new kind of politics that might actually work to the benefit of the people. Four such writers are joining us in the Writer’s Tent to talk about their work. Ken Saunders debut novel is a political satire almost as outrageous as our actual Australian politicians. Ken imagines our nation ten years from now, when the not very good ideas around today have become ten years worse. With an absurdist sense of humour compared to Douglas Adams, Ken presents to us a possible future that, while we can enjoy laughing at, we should all work very hard to avoid. Jeff Sparrow is a prolific writer, editor and broadcaster whose new book, Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right traces the changing attitudes to democracy and trauma, symbolism and liberation, in an exhilarating history of ideas and movements. Challenging progressive and conservative orthodoxies alike, Jeff makes a persuasive case for a return to a “direct politics” approach and calls for solidarity, liberation and activism. |
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3:00pm | Rick Morton, One Hundred Years of Dirt
Rick Morton is an award-winning journalist and social affairs writer for The Australian whose debut memoir One Hundred Years of Dirt has been a runaway success. One Hundred Years of Dirt is a memoir of family; a meditation on anger, fear of others and an obsession with real and imagined borders. It provides valuable insight into the cycle of poverty, class and trauma to which too many of us are blind. Yet it is also a testimony to the strength of familial love and endurance, and the heroes who are never rewarded. Join us as we sit down with Rick to hear about his incredible story firsthand. |
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3:40pm | Fiona Wright, The World Was Whole
Fiona Wright is an award-winning poet and essayist, highly regarded critic and inner-west local whose previous essay collection, Small Acts of Disappearance captivated us all. Now she offers readers a kind of counterpoint with The World Was Whole, shifting her focus from extremity and attempts to transcend the physical to the pleasures of regularity and immanence. These essays are about the ordinary and unspectacular — about ritual and repetition, about homes and homeliness, and about the way we attend to, and make meaning from, the day-to-day experiences that make up the most of our lives. The majority of them are set in Sydney’s inner and south-western suburbs, though one strays all the way to Iceland, and they all give a vital, candid voice to the experience of chronic illness and its treatment, alongside the consideration of how this can reshape and reorder our assumptions about the world and our place within it. Join us as we sit down with Fiona to discuss our incredibly ordinary, astoundingly complex lives. |
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4:20pm | Sweatshop Writers: Maryam Azam, Winnie Dunn, Shirley Le and The Big Black Thing
Sweatshop is a literacy movement based in Western Sydney which is devoted to empowering groups and individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse background through training and employment in creative and critical writing initiatives. Sweatshop initiatives result in publications, films, podcasts, plays, performance readings, exhibitions, and arts and cultural seminars which aim to create new and alternative forms of representation for marginalised communities throughout Western Sydney, and similar communities throughout Australia. We are huge fans of Sweatshop and are thrilled to be joined in the Writer’s Tent by Winnie Dunn, Shirley Le and Maryam Azam, all contributors to The Big Black Thing which features prose and poetry by emerging and established writers from Indigenous, migrant and refugee backgrounds. Winnie Dunn is a Tongan-Australian from Mount Druitt. She is a Manager and Editor at Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement and a Bachelor of Arts graduate from Western Sydney University. Winnie’s work has been published in The Lifted Brow, Cordite Poetry Review, Sydney Review of Books, The Griffith Review and The Big Black Thing. Shirley Le is a Vietnamese-Australian writer from Western Sydney. She holds a BA from Macquarie University. In 2014, she won First Prize in ZineWest. Since then, her short stories and essays have been published in SBS Online, The Lifted Brow, The Griffith Review, Meanjin and The Big Black Thing. Shirley is a recipient of a 2017 WestWords Emerging Writers Fellowship. Maryam Azam is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement and a high school teacher in Kellyville. She completed a BA (Deans Scholars) from Western Sydney University and graduated with Honours in Creative Writing in 2014. She also holds a diploma in the Islamic Sciences. Maryam was the recipient of a 2015 WestWords Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her debut poetry collection, The Hijab Files, was published in 2018. |
