MWF announces 2023 program
Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) has announced its 2023 program, which will run from 4–7 May 2023 and be held predominately at State Library Victoria (SLV) and the Capitol theatre.
Opening night at Melbourne Town Hall features a session with American-Australian author Sarah Krasnostein, Wiradjuri poet and artist Jazz Money, and US authors Benjamin Dreyer and Bill Hayes, where the Age Book of the Year will also be announced. Following the opening night event, at the same venue, singer-songwriter Paul Kelly will perform music and recite poems in an exclusive show for MWF.
British author Bernardine Evaristo, winner of the 2019 Booker Prize winner, will close the festival, discussing her memoir Manifesto: On never giving up (Penguin). Other international guests include US authors Emma Straub and Gabrielle Zevin; Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka discussing his 2022 Booker Prize-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort Of Books); US food writer Alison Roman on her latest cookbook, Sweet Enough (Hardie Grant); and Irish author Claire Keegan on her Booker Prize-shortlisted novella Small Things Like These (Faber).
First Nations curators Tony Birch and Ellen van Neerven will each host several First Nations-related sessions. Among these, Birch will invite Paul Daley and Fiona McFarlane to consider frontier fictions and will interview van Neerven about their forthcoming new book Personal Score (UQP, May), while van Neerven has curated events including the MWF Big Debate: Sports Versus Literature as well as a panel with Charmaine Papertalk Green, Dianne Jones, Jeanine Leane and Yhonnie Scarce discussing how the interplay of art and writing by First Nations creatives can reshape how we see ourselves as a nation.
Other local highlights include New Zealand actor Sam Neill sharing his memoir Did I Ever Tell You This? (Text); former Australian of the Year Grace Tame on her memoir The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner (Macmillan); Stan Grant on his book The Queen is Dead (Fourth Estate); and novelists including Pip Williams, Jane Harper and Tracey Lien.
Festival director Michaela McGuire says this year’s theme, ‘I’ve Been Away for a While’, is ‘an invitation to find our way back to each other, to ourselves, and to the very world we all inhabit. But as who we are now. Perhaps changed, perhaps the same, perhaps still unknowable and unsure.’
‘Throughout the last few discomfiting years, many of us have felt far away from who we once were. Our circumstances, behaviours, even our personalities, have changed, possibly forever. For a while, physical travel was impossible, and we relied solely on reading (and, ok, on streaming services) as a way of being transported to other worlds, perspectives and states of mind. Reading is inherently connected with daydreaming and imagination. We “get lost” in books, the rest of the world falling away until someone interrupts to ask “where we went”.’
To view the full MWF 2023 program, see the festival’s website.
Pictured: 2022 Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka.
Category: Local news
