This year’s Byron Writers Festival is a star-studded celebration of national icons and local legends gathered under the festival theme Passion & Purpose.
Exploring what makes a life well-lived, these passionate writers represent a diverse spectrum of talent from former AFL player turned children’s book author Tony Armstrong to surfing legend Layne Beachley and ABC’s Elder in Residence Jackie Huggins.
Feature events
Australia’s most respected living writer Helen Garner headlines the program and will appear in two conversations, with Kerry O’Brien on the evening of festival Friday, and with fellow novelist Jock Serong on festival Sunday.
Get your trivia brain into gear for Saturday night’s game show hosted by the team from Guardian Australia. The Are You Game Show features special guest contestants Robbie Arnott, Tigest Girma, Thomas Mayo and Michael Robotham, and promises to be ‘an extremely enjoyable and deeply chaotic battle of the brains’.
Later on Saturday night is the annual poetry showcase, headlined by powerhouse Indigenous performer Ziggy Ramo and author of Human. Featuring poets and singer-songwriters including Mparntwe-based poet Laurie May and winners from the Poets Out Loud Slam and Australian Poetry Slam heat, you’ll also see local poet Sarah Temporal and many more stars from Australia and overseas.
Hot topics
The program features experienced voices from the realm of politics including Barry Jones, former national president of the Australian Labor Party, and Don Watson, writer and former speechwriter and advisor to Paul Keating. Jones and Watson will be joined by The Forever War author Nick Bryant and Director of the Australia Institute’s International & Security Affairs Program Emma Shortis to discuss all things USA on the panel conversation Trump’d.
Beloved television presenter and producer Andrew Denton will appear with photographer Julian Kingma, who has produced a book of photographic portraits documenting voluntary assisted dying, of which Denton is a leading advocate and spokesperson via his charity Go Gentle.
Leading Indigenous advocates will reflect on the 2023 Voice referendum and discuss the ways forward, with Yes campaigner Thomas Mayo, NSW Treaty Commissioner Naomi Moran, and Commissioner For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts on the panel The Voice: What’s Next on festival Saturday.
International guests
The international contingent features the American-Canadian journalist John Vaillant, whose book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World about the Canadian wildfires was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize. See him in conversation with climate journalist Royce Kurmelovs on festival Friday. Vaillant, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and National Geographic, is also a celebrated novelist, and will speak to his book The Tiger on the panel Animals as Symbols on festival Saturday alongside Australian novelists Robbie Arnott (Dusk) and Melanie Cheng (The Burrow).
British novelist Esther Freud is another big festival Friday ‘in conversation’, with Freud set to be interviewed by ABC Radio National’s Big Ideas host Natasha Mitchell. Freud’s new novel My Sister and Other Lovers continues her exploration of familial bonds with striking likeness to her own bohemian upbringing. Freud features on the Matriarchs panel on festival Saturday alongside favourites Gina Chick (We Are the Stars) and Nardi Simpson (The Belburd), women with a keen interest in, and experience with, strong matrilineal lines.
Writers coming to Byron from India include poet Akhil Katyal, graphic novelist Ita Mehrotra, and festival director Mary Therese Kurkalang. Katyal, who co-edited The World That Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia, will feature in the Friday morning session Delhi to Mumbai: Poems, as well as performing at Beyond the Lines. Mehrotra will showcase her political graphic novels documenting protest movements (Shaheen Bagh) and the struggle for forest rights (Uprooted) in India in the conversation session Activist Art. She will lead a comics and zines workshop in Mullumbimby on the Thursday ahead of the festival. Kurkalang will interview both writers as a respected figure in Indian publishing, currently working with artists in the Eastern Himalayas.
• Explore the program at byronwritersfestival.com.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
