Byron Writers Festival

Yuwaalaraay writer and founding member of Indigenous folk duo Stiff Gins, Nardi Simpson talks with Bundjalung writer, editor and Byron Writers Festival board member Grace Lucas-Pennington about her debut novel Song of the Crocodile. Full of music, Yuwaalaraay language and exquisite description, Song of the Crocodile is a lament to choice and change, and the unyielding land that sustains us all, if...

In this conversation, recorded live as part of Byron Writers Festival's out-of-season program, author and academic Jenny Hocking joins celebrated journalist Kerry O’Brien to discuss her revealing new book The Palace Letters: The Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam. In this ground breaking account, Hocking discloses the obstruction, intrigue and duplicity she faced du...

In this Conversations from Byron podcast, Jock Serong speaks with Chris Hanley about his new book The Burning Island. They discuss creating in the time of Covid-19, while Jock walks us through some of his researching and writing habits. Delving into the book itself, Jock explains where the idea for the story originated and its relationship to his previous novel Preservation. They go on to discuss...

In this Conversations from Byron podcast, Mirandi Riwoe speaks with Melanie Cheng about her experience of researching and writing about the Australian gold rush. They discuss Chinese-Australian history and its place within our broader colonial literature, and explore how stories like this one can help bring the once invisible and voiceless to the forefront of our imaginations. About the book: Fami...

Nazeem Hussain is a grown man whose Mum won’t let him go to Sri Lanka. At least, not without her by his side. But he’s just had a kid, and he’s started thinking ahead to the questions his son might ask him one day, like ‘why are we brown?’ So Naz flies to Sri Lanka with the echoes of his Mum’s protests in his ears. In his new Audible Original Podcast, Rogue Son, we follow comedian Nazeem Hussain a...

Kindred, Kirli Saunders’ debut poetry collection, is a pleasure to lose yourself in. Kirli has a keen eye for observation, humour and big themes that surround Love, Connection & Loss in an engaging style, complemented by evocative and poignant imagery. Kindred talks to identity, culture, community and the role of Earth as healer. It has the ability to grab hold of the personal in the universal and...

The Thea Astley Address, named in honour of one of Australia’s most influential and distinctive novelists, has been presented annually at the Byron Writers Festival since 2005 - by some of Australia’s best writers and most interesting minds. This year, we add to the prestigious list Professor Marcia Langton, one of our country's most important voices for Indigenous Australia. The 2020 Thea Astley...

S. Shakthidharan’s award-winning play, Counting and Cracking, is a story about Australia as a land of refuge, about Sri Lanka’s efforts to remain united, and about reconciliation within families, across countries and generations. Shakthi’s latest play, The Jungle and The Sea, was due to open on the day of this interview, but has been put on hold due to Covid-19 restrictions. In this Conversations...

Jean Kittson's warm and witty practical guide is a one-stop shop for information on how to support your ageing loved ones: how to protect their health and wellbeing, keep them safe and secure, and enable them to be self-determining and independent for as long as possible. Compelled to discuss some of life's most confronting questions, Jean shares heartfelt, personal stories alongside expert advice...

Join some of Australia’s finest writers for a collection of unexpected tales: reflections on lives well lived and battles fought, pride, prejudice, love and humour. The LGBTQI+ community has been sharing stories for centuries, creating their own histories, disrupting and reinventing conventional ideas about narrative, family, love and community. There’s more to being queer than coming out and gett...

On June 4, Federal Police raided the home of Walkley award-winning journalist Annika Smethurst, changing her life forever. Police claim they were investigating the publication of classified information, her employer called it a 'dangerous act of intimidation', Smethurst believes she was simply doing her job. Smethurst became the accidental poster woman for press freedom as politicians debated the...

2038. On a remote island off the Pacific coast of British Columbia stands the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral, one of the world’s last forests. Wealthy tourists flock from all corners of the dust-choked globe to see the spectacle and remember what once was. But even as they breathe in the fresh air and pose for photographs amidst the greenery, guide Jake knows that the forest is dying, though her bos...

Tegan Bennett Daylight has led a life in books – as a writer, a teacher and a critic, but first and foremost as a reader. In this deeply insightful and intimate work, Daylight describes how her reading has nourished her life, and how life has informed her reading. In both, she shows us that it’s the small points of connection – the details – that really matter: what we notice when someone close to...

Narrated by a 13,000-year-old extinct mammoth, this is the (mostly) true story of how a collection of prehistoric creatures came to be on sale at a natural history auction in New York in 2007. By tracing how and when these fossils were unearthed, Mammoth leads us on a funny and fascinating journey from the Pleistocene epoch to nineteenth-century America and beyond, revealing how ideas about scienc...

Gabriel Fox, the young son of an old English house, arrives in a land both ancient and new. Drawn by the promise of his heart's desire, and compelled to distance himself from pain at home, Gabriel begins his quest into Van Diemen's Land. His guide, a Cannibal who is not all he seems, leads him north where Gabriel might free himself of his distracting burden and seek the woman he must find. As Gabr...

Life in a troubled neighbourhood demands too much too young. But Sonny wouldn’t really know. Watching the world from her bedroom window, she exists only in second-hand romance novels and falls for any fast-food employee who happens to spare her a glance. Everything changes with the return of Vince, a boy who became a legend after he was hauled away in handcuffs at fourteen. Sonny and Vince used to...

Christos Tsiolkas' stunning new novel Damascus is a work of soaring ambition and achievement, of immense power and epic scope, taking as its subject nothing less than events surrounding the birth and establishment of the Christian church. Based around the gospels and letters of St Paul, and focusing on characters one and two generations on from the death of Christ, as well as Paul (Saul) himself,...

The lives of three women weave together across four centuries in the dazzling new book from Evie Wyld, winner of the Miles Franklin Award. Surging out of the sea, the Bass Rock has for centuries watched over the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries the fates of three women are linked: to this place, to each other. Each woman’s choices are circumscribe...

This debut collection of short stories by Yumna Kassab is remarkable for its minimalism. Set in the suburbs of Western Sydney, it portrays the lives of Lebanese immigrants, and their families. The stories revolve around their hopes and regrets, their feelings of isolation, and their nostalgia for what they might have lost or left behind. In particular, The House of Youssef is about relationships,...

When urban academic Hayley Katzen moves to a remote Australian cattle property to live with her farmer girlfriend, she hopes, at last, to find home. But this is no happy-ever-after tree change. Lecture halls, law reform and the arts are replaced with castrating calves, shovelling manure, fire-fighting and anti-gas blockades. In a place that attracts people who live by their own rules, Hayley must...

James Bradley’s new novel Ghost Species is a beautiful and deeply affecting exploration of connection and loss in an age of planetary trauma. Set against the backdrop of hastening climate catastrophe, a group of scientists are working to re-engineer the climate by resurrecting extinct species. The protagonist Kate becomes enmeshed in another, more clandestine program to recreate our long-lost rela...

Journalist Jess Hill‘s now Stella Award-winning book 'See What You Made Me Do', calls for a radical rethink on how we see and deal with domestic abuse in Australia. She spoke to Margot Saville at the 2019 Byron Writers Festival about the three somewhat harrowing years she spent writing the book, and how it changed her perception of the issue.

Our fascination with fire goes back millennia and with changing climate conditions, fire will only take greater hold on our collective psyche. This important session brings together 'The Arsonist' author Chloe Hopper, fire historian Stephen Pyne and RFS veteran Peter Watt to discuss our evolving relationship with fire and how to better work WITH fire, rather than against it.

Toni Jordan and Barbara Toner speak with Mandy Nolan about the challenge of writing funny characters and creating humourous moments in fiction, and where they find their inspiration.

Vicki Laveau-Harvie talks with Kate McClymont about 'The Erratics' - her 2019 Stella award-wining memoir which took the literary world by storm with its ferocious, yet darkly funny depiction of familial dysfunction.