This year’s festival celebrates some of the most vital and impactful storytelling in Australian literature, with a dedicated program of First Nations writers whose work spans historical fiction, picture books and Indigenous knowledge and whose voices are reshaping how this country understands itself.

Ev King-Prime opened the first art gallery in Byron and helped develop the nascent visual arts scene on the North Coast.

An ambitious lineup of gourmet delights, inspired events, thought provoking discussions and creative collaborations will again entice food lovers to Tweed Shire this October.

On Sunday, a memorial was unveiled at the RSL Memorial Park, next to the Ballina RSL, to pay tribute to those lost on the night of May 4 on the Ballina Bar.

While Australia’s parliamentarians were frocking up for the Midwinter Ball last week, representatives of the nation’s authors, musicians and artists were in Canberra pleading for assurances that the government would not water down copyright laws, as part of a deal with giant tech firms to build $50bn worth of new data centres across the country.

Ending rough sleeping is no small challenge for Byron Shire and the Northern Rivers but that is the aim of the Ending Rough Sleeping Collaboration and the release of the 1,000 Voices Byron Shire report just released.