Adelaide Writers' Week
Episodes
AWW21 The Shadow King with Maaza Mengiste
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Shadow King is a powerful, poetic book about women soldiers during the Italian Ethiopian war of 1935, the first ...
AWW21 The World of Words - Sue Butler and Pip Williams
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Pip Williams’ wonderful novel The Dictionary of Lost Words documents the origin of the Oxford Dictionary through the tale of the fictional Esme Nico...
AWW21 There Goes the Neighbourhood - Chongyi Feng and Geoff Raby
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Insults flying via Twitter, lobsters dying on the tarmac in Shanghai, Ministers’ phone calls snubbed by their counterparts: how has our relationship...
AWW21 Tribes and Tribulations: Growing up Gay - Shannon Molloy and Ronnie Scott
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In his harrowing memoir, Fourteen: My Year of Darkness, and the light that followed, Shannon Molloy details the violence and fear he perpetually suffe...
AWW21 Trouble of the Mind: Mental Illness in Fiction - Luke Horton and Meg Mason
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The devastating effect of mental health afflictions and their impact on both the individual and their nearest and dearest is sensitively and sometimes...
AWW21 The Time of Our Lives - Robert Dessaix
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Dessaix’s new book is an essential companion for those pondering how to age well, and cogitating on what life is all about anyway. The Time o...
AWW21 Twilight Talks | Authorial Voice: Leaving It All on the Page
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Join broadcaster, author, comedian and host of 2021’s all-Australian Authorial Voice Sami Shah as he talks to a panel who are comfortable Leaving It...
AWW21 Truganini - Ian Anderson and Cassandra Pybus
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Liberated from the tropes of tragedy that have dominated previous accounts, Cassandra Pybus’ biography of Nuenonne woman Truganini finally does just...
AWW21 Twilight Talks | Unstable Ground
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As the sun sets, the heat recedes and work is done for the day, the bar is open and the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden is the place to be as some o...
AWW21 Watsonia - Don Watson
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
With wit, wisdom and endless curiosity, Don Watson has spent a lifetime writing on subjects as diverse as they are entertaining. This definitive antho...
AWW21 What Are You Going Through? - Sigrid Nunez
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Sigrid Nunez took twenty-five years to become an overnight success with her seventh book, the National Book Award winning The Friend, the story of a w...
AWW21 The Rain Heron - Robbie Arnott
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Robbie Arnott burst on to the literary scene with his gloriously imaginative debut, Flames, a novel of stylistic ingenuity that traversed genres with ...
AWW21 Whither Australian Leadership? - Katharine Murphy and Laura Tingle
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Two of our most incisive political analysts examine the state of leadership in Australia. Drawing on their recent Quarterly Essays, Laura Tingle (Foll...
AWW21 What Happens Next? - Emma Dawson, Richard Denniss and Gideon Haigh
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Even before we emerged blinking from Iso and the year that was 2020, we started to ask, “What Happens Next?”. Executive Director of Per Capita Emm...
AWW21 Witness: an Investigation into the Brutal Cost of Seeking Justice - Louise Milligan
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Born of Louise Milligan’s own brutal experience as a witness in the Cardinal Pell case, Witness is at once a gripping, powerful, meticulously resear...
AWW21 Women and Leadership - Julia Gillard
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The message from Julia Gillard and her co-author, former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to young female aspirants to public life in Wo...
AWW21 Words and Worlds - Malcolm Knox and Jacqueline Maley
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Malcolm Knox and Jacqueline Maley are highly respected journalists, each a recipient of Australian journalism’s highest honour, the Walkley Award.&n...
AWW21 Middle & YA Day | Word Spy with Ursula Dubosarsky
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Match wits with the Word Spy! Join the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2021, Ursula Dubosarsky (aka The Word Spy) for an entertaining quiz for ch...
AWW21 Apeirogon - Colum McCann
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Colum McCann’s profoundly moving masterpiece, Apeirogon, is based on a true story of a friendship between “An Israeli, against the Occupation. A P...
AWW21 All Our Shimmering Skies - Trent Dalton
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Trent Dalton’s dazzling debut, Boy Swallows Universe, became the fastest selling Australian fiction debut ever, selling over half a million copies i...
AWW21 A Bigger Picture - Malcolm Turnbull
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister in September 2015, Australians of all political persuasion breathed a sigh of relief that the hyperpartisa...
AWW21 A Room Made of Leaves - Kate Grenville
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Kate Grenville’s latest novel A Room Made of Leaves continues the disruption of conventional colonial narratives that began with her acclaimed The S...
AWW21 The Tolstoy Estate with Steven Conte
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his debut novel, The Zookeeper’s War, Steven Conte returns to World War II for his stunning new ...
AWW21 Benevolence - Julie Janson
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Based on the oral histories of the Darug people, Julie Janson has said that her ambitious and illuminating new novel, Benevolence, was written as an A...
AWW21 Be The Change | Seeing it, Being it with Briggs
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Musician, writer, author, activist, cultural commentator and all-round powerhouse, Briggs speaks truth to power in a myriad of poetic, hilarious, high...
AWW21 Be The Change | Climate: Changing Minds and Taking Action with Rebecca Huntley and Jonica Newby
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Rebecca Huntley (How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference) and Jonica Newby (Beyond Climate Grief) discuss ways to shake off ...
AWW21 Be The Change | Finding Hope with Jess Scully
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Developing a clear vision, a fairer world, a utopia, is done slowly, over time, with care, commitment, courage and creativity. Jess Scully has travell...
AWW21 Be The Change | Marshalling the Troops with Jean Hinchliffe and Sally Rugg
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Effecting change can be hard, requiring effort, energy and organisation. Sally Rugg (How Powerful We Are) demonstrated all these, and no small degree ...
AWW21 Charismatic Crime Fighters - Chris Hammer and Emma Viskic
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Australian crime writers are riding a wave of global success, consistently creating compelling and charismatic characters who investigate heinous crim...
AWW21 Coming of Age in the War on Terror - Randa Abdel-Fattah
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The shocking image of planes smashing into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 was a defining moment in the modern era. We now have a generat...
AWW21 Griffith Review 71: Remaking the Balance - Gabrielle Chan, Nardi Simpson and Clare Wright
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Was 2020 a year of rupture that will change what we do with what we have? How will it impact on our ideas of access and abundance, of security and age...
AWW21 Ghost Species - James Bradley
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
An Elon Musk-style billionaire persuades scientist Kate Larkin to join his secretive new project. Its ambitious aim is to re-engineer our collapsing c...
AWW21 Hamnet - Maggie O’Farrell
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning Hamnet gives us new and illuminating insight into Shakespeare and his masterpiece, and the family that nurtured h...
AWW21 First Words
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Join a stellar lineup of South Australian First Nations writers Mandy Brown, Ali Cobby Eckerman, Natalie Harkin, Dominic Guerrera, Steven Pappin, Cele...
AWW21 City Series
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the iconic City Series and the publication of updated versions on our eight capital cities, this special double ...
AWW21 Hazel Rowley Address: Making Characters, Biography and Memoir - Jacqueline Kent
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this year’s lecture in memory of biographer Hazel Rowley, Jacqueline Kent, biographer of Vida Goldstein, Julia Gillard and Hephzibah Menuhin, tur...
AWW21 A Burning with Megha Majumdar
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Megha Majumdar’s electric novel, A Burning, is the taut, riveting tale of three individuals whose lives become entangled in the aftermath of an horr...
AWW21 How Much of These Hills is Gold? - C Pam Zhang
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Compared by The New York Times to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Steinbeck’s mighty The Grapes of Wrath, C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is...
AWW21 Hear me Roar! Slam Poetry Performance
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Join us for a session of exhilarating and inspiring spoken word performance showcasing poets invigorating our local and national stages, including Aus...
AWW21 Homeland Elegies - Ayad Akhtar
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Described by Richard Flanagan as the “best American novel I’ve read in years”, Pulitzer Prize-winner Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies combines m...
AW21 Hurricane Season - Fernanda Melchor
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A savage, violent howl of a book by one of Mexico’s most exciting writers, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season explores the deep misogyny and femi...
AWW21 Infinite Splendours - Sofie Laguna
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Gifted youngster Lawrence enjoys an idyllic childhood in regional Victoria, where he lives with his widowed mother and young brother at the foot of th...
AWW21 Future Awry with Patrick Allington and Dennis Glover
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Patrick Allington’s Rise & Shine, an environmental apocalypse has wiped out most of the population. Those that survive are nourished – lite...
AWW21 First on the Scene - Benjamin Gilmour and Rachael Mead
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What inner strength is required when your working day is filled with injury, death and despair? Rachael Mead and Benjamin Gilmour can tell us. In The ...
AWW21 Lateral Histories - Chris Flynn and Laura Elvery
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Can works of fiction inform us more effectively than non-fiction? Chris Flynn and Laura Elvery’s audacious works illuminate history and offer critiq...
AWW21 Land of Mates and Favours - Richard Denniss, Cameron Murray and Marian Wilkinson
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Does Australia have a problem with rent-seekers, well-connected insiders who have their snouts firmly in the public trough, enriching themselves and t...
AWW21 Lost Women of History - Danielle Clode and Judith Hoare
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When Danielle Clode set out to research In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World, about the first woman to circumnavigate the earth, she discovered...
AWW21 Julian Assange: The Most Dangerous Man in the World - Andrew Fowler
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Updated to include contemporary events of 2020, Andrew Fowler’s account of Julian Assange’s rise and fall is a damning indictment of the lengths t...
AWW21 Know Her Place: The Philosophy of Misogyny and Male Entitlement - Kate Manne
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Misogyny is the “law enforcement arm of patriarchy” that polices and punishes “bad women” who threaten male dominance, argues philosopher Kate...
AWW21 Leading Lady: Lowitja's Legacy - Stuart Rintoul
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Described by Noel Pearson as “the most outstanding Aboriginal leader of the contemporary era”, Lowitja O’Donoghue navigated an early life of los...
AWW21 Life After Truth - Ceridwen Dovey
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Five old friends on the cusp of middle age meet at their fifteen year Harvard reunion and wonder if they’re wasting or realising their potential. An...
AWW21 MUD Literary Prize: Pip Williams
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Inaugurated by the passionate readers who comprise Adelaide’s MUD Literary Club – the only philanthropic organisation in the country exclusively s...
AWW21 Middle & YA Day | Little Quirks and Grand Passions with Poppy Nwosu
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Poppy Nwosu’s quick-witted romantic comedies, Making Friends with Alice Dyson and Taking Down Evelyn Tait, romp through friendship and romance, with...
AWW21 Mothers and Secrets - Katherine Tamiko Arguile and Victoria Hannan
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Katherine Tamiko Arguile’s beautifully melancholic The Things She Owned , a visit from her cousin leads Erika to make sense of her fraught relati...
AWW21 Middle & YA Day | New Realities with James Bradley, Jess Scully and Sean Williams
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In a time of crisis what are the ways forward? What possibilities have been created by science, community and technology? A stellar line up of contemp...
AWW21 Middle & YA Day | R.A. Spratt's Super Sleuths
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
R.A. Spratt is on the case with her dual detecting series The Peski Kids and Friday Barnes: Girl Detective! Avid fans can follow the clues and investi...
AWW21 Middle & YA Day | Monuments Mash Up - Will Kostakis
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Drawing on his Greek heritage, Will Kostakis subverts the norm with the duology Monuments and Rebel Gods juxtaposing contemporary Sydney teenagers, wi...
AWW21 One Bright Moon - Andrew Kwong
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Kwong’s quietly gripping memoir takes us deep into Maoist China and the stark human cost of the Great Leap Forward. With parents from the int...
AWW21 Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women - Christina Lamb
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“Rape”, writes Christina Lamb, one of the world’s foremost war correspondents who has worked in war and combat zones for over thirty years, “i...
AWW21 Parwana: Becoming an Adelaide Icon - Durkhanai Ayubi
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Parwana Afghan Kitchen opened in Adelaide in 2009 with a vision to share Afghan cuisine and culture. It swiftly became a beloved part of the city, att...
AWW21 Phosphorescence - Julia Baird
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
After writing her best-selling book, Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder and Things That Sustain You When The World Goes Dark, Julia Baird said she hoped ...
AWW21 Quivering on the Cusp - Naoise Dolan and Jessie Tu
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Naoise Dolan and Jessie Tu were responsible for two of the most bracing, exciting debuts of 2020. Naoise’s Exciting Times and Jessie’s A Lonely Gi...
AWW21 Reading: Immersion and Inspiration - Debra Adelaide and Tegan Bennett Daylight
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Debra Adelaide and Tegan Bennett Daylight have lived their lives immersed in books – as writers, editors, critics, teachers and, most importantly, a...
AWW21 Poetry Reading - G. Goodfellow, J. Janson, N. Simpson and J. Tu
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Join Peter Goldsworthy for an hour of poetry reading, featuring a line-up of celebrated poets drawn from Writers’ Week guests and South Austral...
AWW Reframing the Classics - Natalie Haynes
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
With her acclaimed BBC radio series just commissioned for a seventh series, broadcaster, author, stand up comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes is ce...
AWW21 Riding the Wave - Vivian Pham and Andrew Pippos
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Andrew Pippos’ lively debut Lucky’s, his eponymous soldier stays in Sydney after World War II to forge a life amongst the Greek diaspora and th...
AWW21 Shifting Perspectives - Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and Mirandi Riwoe
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Mirandi Riwoe’s award-winning Stone Sky Gold Mountain, we experience Australia’s Gold Rush through the eyes of Chinese immigrants Ying and Lai ...
AWW21 (Re)Launch: Live and Local!
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Across the COVID-plagued year that was 2020, many of the great South Australian authors featured at this year’s Writers’ Week had to pivot to onli...
AWW21 The Business of Being a Writer - A Day in the Life of a Writer & Bookseller
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How much work does a bestselling author need to do to promote their book? What do they wish they had known about promotion that they have learned alon...
AWW21 Show Me Where it Hurts: Living with Invisible Illness - Kylie Maslen
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Shortlisted for this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Kylie Maslen’s Show Me Where It Hurts explores the impact of chronic illness on...
AWW21 The Believer - Sarah Krasnostein
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Krasnostein’s first book, The Trauma Cleaner, was a runaway bestseller and swept literary prizes nationally. Her new book is The Believer, an ...
AWW21 Suburban Dreaming - Geoff Goodfellow and Christopher Raja
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The suburb looms large in the physical and imaginary landscape of this country, a loaded repository of hopes and aspirations. In his long anticipated ...
AWW21 The Business of Being a Writer - On The Road to Publication
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When is a manuscript ready to submit? Do you need an agent or should you go straight to the publisher? How to best present your work and choose the de...
AWW21 Saving Lives, One Choice at a Time - Christine Jackman and Rick Morton
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What changes do we need to make in our lives to get the lives we want to live? Spurred by a sense of something lacking in their own lives, Rick Morton...