An election and wild weather couldn't stop our most isolated writers festival

Sydney Morning Herald

13-05-2025

When Marcus Zusak came to Margaret River in 2000 to do a library reading from his first novel, nobody turned up. The librarian made him do the reading anyway.
Twenty-five years later, when The Book Thief author returned, he was in a big theatre full of readers. 'It's amazing to us that you're still out there,' he said to his audience. 'It gives me hope. I feel like I'm looking at the last bastion of civilisation.'
These last bastions crop up everywhere. In May alone we've seen events such as the Margaret River Readers & Writers Festival, the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, the Penola Coonawarra Arts Festival and the Sunshine Coast Hinterland Writers Festival, with the Sydney Writers Festival due to start on Monday.
I attended the 17th Margaret River festival, in the southwestern corner of Australia, possibly the most isolated literary gathering in the world. That isolation, plus a federal election and wild weather, failed to stop a record crowd of more than 7000 watching more than 50 writers, including Booker Prize winner Samantha Harvey, Booker finalist Charlotte Wood, feminist icon turned crime writer Jane Caro and bestselling Irish novelist Marian Keyes.
The theme of the festival was 'the universe is made not of atoms but of stories'. Nobody actually agreed with this – of course the universe is made of atoms! – but Samantha Harvey put us in a humble cosmic mood with a reading from her novel Orbital evoking the vision of the universe as a calendar year, where humankind emerges in the last blink before midnight on New Year's Eve.
British philosopher A. C. Grayling, billed as 'the rock star professor', said he went to bed with Jane Austen every Easter, and went on to analyse the philosophy of Pride and Prejudice. He wanted us to rescue the much-derided term 'woke' and wear it with pride. But he wasn't quite so keen on cancel culture: 'You should hear what they have to say, so you can challenge it.' And he revealed he'd been banned from Twitter 'by that defender of freedom of expression, Elon Musk'.
Hannah Kent told us about her tough time as an exchange student in Iceland, the inspiration for her novel Burial Rites. She was brave enough to try the disgusting local delicacy, rotten shark meat. Another time she found herself in a mysterious meeting of Icelanders who decided she could be their slave and sweep up the blood. Fortunately, the blood was fake: they were actors in a play.
Peter Godwin's memoir was full of distress, secrets and surprising humour. At the age of 90, his mother took to her bed for no apparent medical reason and began to let loose with uninhibited jibes, all spoken in a brand new frightfully posh voice.