AWW 2023 audience ‘informed, provoked and entertained’
The 2023 Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) drew crowds of 17,000 people to the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden from 4–9 March. The event hosted 158 writers and authors across 130 sessions of open-air readings, panel discussions and literary conversations, both live and broadcast.
Under the theme ‘Truth Be Told’, this year’s event featured international authors including Simon Armitage (UK), Claudia Roden (UK), Sloane Crosley (US), Louise Kennedy (Ireland), and Ben MacIntyre (UK) and Australian guests including Heather Rose, Shaun Micallef, Bernadette Brennan, Shannon Burns, Megan Davis, and Brigid Delaney. The sessions were livestreamed into 92 libraries, schools, retirement villages and nursing homes.
The writers’ week held 18 sessions across Kids’ Day and Middle Grade & YA Day. Children’s authors included Sean Williams, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Sarah Ayoub, Tristan Bancks, Kate Temple, Jared Thomas and Craig Silvey.
The top three bestselling books at AWW 2023 were:
- We Don’t Know Ourselves: A personal history of Ireland since 1958 (Fintan O’Toole, Apollo)
- Trespasses (Louise Kennedy, Bloomsbury)
- Colditz: Prisoners of the castle (Ben Macintyre, Viking).
Said AWW director Louise Adler: ‘Writers’ Week 2023 is over and it was a genuine privilege to present my first as Director. What a pleasure it was to see bibliophiles turn out in their thousands, starting each morning at 8am for Breakfast with Papers hosted by the inimitable Tom Wright, through to a twilight version of Insiders, and an Under the Covers session hosted by the conversationalists without parallel—Richard Fidler and Sarah Kanowski. The Premier of South Australia reminded us that politicians shouldn’t meddle in cultural matters, Sir David Hare recalled for us the impact of Covid, Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich took us into the soul of Homo Sovieticus, Mohammed El-Kurd shared his poetry and his pain, and John Banville took a moment to tell us that “art is a serious business, but solemnity is the death of art”. We were collectively informed, provoked and entertained. Writers inspired us and we bought their books. May the sun shine on Adelaide Writers’ Week in 2024.’
Category: Local news
