Melbourne’s culinary icon and award-winning restaurateur Ben Shewry – of Attica fame – takes centre stage at the 2025 Byron Writers Festival. Ben will appear across two captivating sessions on Saturday, 9 August including a discussion on his absorbing memoir-meets-manifesto Uses for Obsession.
In Uses for Obsession, you challenge toxic chef culture and the myths around sustainability, while offering a hopeful vision for hospitality. What conversations do you hope this book sparks in the food world and beyond?
That we need to be kinder to all things – people, community, the planet. The old ways are corrupt and broken. It is upon each of us to neither accept old tropes nor perpetuate them. There are no more excuses, and there’s no time to wait. Get out there, give a damn and be more fearless.
If readers could take just one thing from your book, what would you want it to be?
That few of us are just ‘a pawn in the game’. If we choose to, we can step back from the machinery of our lives, and see that we all have some purchase, some power to change things in simple and small ways for ourselves and others. And that those ways can be life-changing.
The theme for Byron Writers Festival is Passion and Purpose. How do you personally define passion and purpose, and how do these definitions shape you as a writer and chef?
To me, passion and purpose combined becomes obsession, and that never gets tired. Creatively, if a person truly loves doing something then they need to find ways to protect it throughout their life. To get to the true purpose of it. When they do, nothing will be able to stop them because it is love we are talking about, not fakeness, fluff or hyperbole.
Ben Shewry will appear at Byron Writers Festival:
Saturday 9 August
– Uses for Obsession
10:30am to 11:30am
Saturday 9 August
– Food and Passion
4:30pm to 5:30pm
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