Latest news with #SydneyWriters'Festival
Sydney Morning Herald
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Is it just me, or is everyone rude now? (It's not just me)
The woman, seated a chair or two away at the Sydney Writers' Festival, leaned over to me when the session had finished. She said: 'Do you always fidget, or do you have a particular problem today?' What? I hadn't been aware that I'd been fidgeting. Perhaps I'd been moving my new knee a little, just to take pleasure in the fact that my leg now works. But the movement would have been minimal. And she was seated a half a metre away. I'm always discombobulated when someone is rude to me. I think most people are. Minutes later, I ran into the writer Sydney writer Charlotte Wood. I told her about the nasty comment and how I'd been lost for words. Well, worse than lost for words. Instead, I'd put on a plummy English accent – why the accent? – and said, 'Madam, if I disturbed you in any way, I do apologise', and then stomped off (to the extent that a man with a new knee can stomp anywhere.) I asked Charlotte 'how come I was unable to come up with something better?' 'That's nothing,' said Charlotte. 'Someone was having me sign their book, and just as they were leaving, they examined me closely and said: 'So, whose idea was the hair?'' Charlotte is a wordsmith of dazzling skill. Her most recent book was shortlisted for last year's Booker Prize. Reviewers praise her wit. Surely, Charlotte would have come up with a zinger, even if I'd failed to manage one. Not a bit of it. She reports responding with a nervous half-laugh, a strange surge of shame – maybe the reader is right! - before quickly turning to the next customer in the queue.
The Age
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Is it just me, or is everyone rude now? (It's not just me)
The woman, seated a chair or two away at the Sydney Writers' Festival, leaned over to me when the session had finished. She said: 'Do you always fidget, or do you have a particular problem today?' What? I hadn't been aware that I'd been fidgeting. Perhaps I'd been moving my new knee a little, just to take pleasure in the fact that my leg now works. But the movement would have been minimal. And she was seated a half a metre away. I'm always discombobulated when someone is rude to me. I think most people are. Minutes later, I ran into the writer Sydney writer Charlotte Wood. I told her about the nasty comment and how I'd been lost for words. Well, worse than lost for words. Instead, I'd put on a plummy English accent – why the accent? – and said, 'Madam, if I disturbed you in any way, I do apologise', and then stomped off (to the extent that a man with a new knee can stomp anywhere.) I asked Charlotte 'how come I was unable to come up with something better?' 'That's nothing,' said Charlotte. 'Someone was having me sign their book, and just as they were leaving, they examined me closely and said: 'So, whose idea was the hair?'' Charlotte is a wordsmith of dazzling skill. Her most recent book was shortlisted for last year's Booker Prize. Reviewers praise her wit. Surely, Charlotte would have come up with a zinger, even if I'd failed to manage one. Not a bit of it. She reports responding with a nervous half-laugh, a strange surge of shame – maybe the reader is right! - before quickly turning to the next customer in the queue.
The Age
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Writers, I'm on your side – now here's my list of complaints
Reading is my favourite hobby. What's not to like about it? It can be done sitting down and can be combined with other hobbies such as drinking a beer or patting the dog. And, while unwilling to put myself forward to test the theory, I'm convinced it makes you smarter. I'm a kindly reader, by which I mean 'largely undiscriminating'. I consider myself on the writer's side, wanting to cheer their endeavours in any project, however unlikely. Yet, even with a forgiving reader, there are quibbles. With Sydney crammed with authors for the annual Sydney Writers' Festival, could I mention some ways they could do better? Non-fiction books that go on too long Long novels are terrific – you sink into the world of Proust, Doris Lessing or Anthony Powell and want the pleasure to never end. With non-fiction, I'm not so sure. I'm interested to know about the Norman Conquest, I really am, but do I need the six-volume, 5000-page account by Edward Augustus Freeman (as recently reviewed on The Rest is History podcast)? I'm interested, also, in Lyndon Baines Johnson, a consequential president whose biographer, Robert Caro, is considered a genius. But do I definitely want to read four volumes, with a combined 3000 pages, and a fifth still to come? With Caro endlessly extending his efforts – see the recent documentary Turn Every Page – there's the danger, for a slow reader, that the life could take longer to read than it took to live. The fashion to eschew quote marks Some of our arty novelists are dispensing with quotation marks. I'm sure there's a reason, although they have yet to whisper that reason into my trusting ear. In these novels, the characters still speak, and sometimes they think, and – if it's a first-person narrator – they often describe things, and into this lumpy soup wades the reader, unequipped with the usual tools for discerning whether actual speech is occurring. At some point – I imagine it was in 1689 or maybe 1723 – some genius printer thought up the quote mark as a useful concession to the reader. I don't believe this useful invention should be so casually thrown away. I'm on the side of writers! I really am! I'm just trying to understand what's going on!!!
Time Out
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Sydney is having a cultural renaissance: "It's time for us to be proud of our city again"
Earlier this week, Time Out released their list of the best cities in the world for culture, and Sydney ranked in fifth place. According to 18,500 survey respondents (locals living in cities around the world, including here in city) and Time Out's global team of arts and culture editors, Sydney has more to offer on the culture front than London, New York, Barcelona and, yep, Melbourne. Following the announcement, NSW Minister for the Arts, Music and the Night-Time Economy John Graham, MLC released a statement shedding a little more light on how Sydney's cultural landscape has been blossoming to lead to this his statement reflecting on Sydney's super-high ranking on the global leaderboard, Minister Graham noted how Sydney's nightlife has bounced back since the lockout laws were lifted back in 2021. But the removal of the lockout laws isn't the only regulation change that's been implemented to boost Sydney's cultural landscape – with recent vibrancy reforms (largely driven forward by Sydney's 24-hour economy commissioner, Mike Rodrigues) having helped the city make big strides. "Since coming to government two years ago we've been fighting to bring Sydney back to life, which has involved cutting lots of red tape that was holding back small venues through to large cultural events," says Minister Graham. The Minister notes some of the initiatives: On the events front, Sydney is home to a strong line-up of annual cultural events supported by the NSW government, including Australian Fashion Week, Sydney Fringe, Sydney Film Festival, Sydney Writers' Festival, Vivid Sydney, SXSW Sydney, Sydney Comedy Festival (to name a few). Then there are our cultural institutions; with the Sydney Opera House consistently recognised as one of the most iconic venues in the world, the Art Gallery of NSW home to one of the world's most spectacular new museum spaces, and other incredible spaces including Walsh Bay Power Station, City Recital Hall and Machine Hall serving up wildly creative, boundary-pushing programs. And things aren't stopping there – Parramatta's Riverside Theatre is getting a major glow-up, as is Ultimo's beloved Powerhouse Museum. Minister Graham admits that it's "not mission accomplished" here in Sydney. "The hard work continues, so stay tuned as we rebuild our night-time economy block-by-block neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood.
The Age
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
A piercing, poignant tale about love, loss and writing
FICTION Love Unedited Caro Llewellyn Picador, $34.99 Caro Llewellyn's Love Unedited is a piercing and poignant story of love, loss and writing that speaks to the magic of working with words, and the humanity too. Llewellyn's novel begins as the main character, Edna, meets her former lover at the Melbourne cafe The European and is transported back in time. I found myself transported back in time, too, to the kernel of truth that made me a reviewer. I remembered how when I was taking my final exams at school I used to live stream the PEN World Voices festival, and found myself caught up in the glamour and the gravitas as a global grouping of writers engaged in discussions about how writing can give hope, and courage, and takes hope, and courage, to produce too. This festival was directed by Llewellyn, who had relocated to New York after directing the Sydney Writers' Festival, and would later become chief executive of Australia's hub of literary writing, The Wheeler Centre. When I learnt Llewellyn had written a romantic roman-à-clef about an editor who worked with a literary author, I was ready to be caught up in the whirlwind romance of their work with words. There is plenty of romance to Love Unedited, and much of it is the romance of independence: work, travel and having the courage of your convictions. Llewellyn's protagonist Edna sees men on scooters in Coney Island and gets on the back of a motorcycle in Paris and the reader is swept up in the adventure of the journey. The romance of the novel is also of the kind more familiar from Shakespearean comedies: star-crossed lovers traversing oceans to be together only to find themselves separated by the tohu bohu of the exigencies of life. Edna falls in love with a serious writer marked by tragedy. What comes next is a romance that is between the novel and the reader, but Llewellyn shows hope and courage in the way she depicts a story that reads beautifully on the page and, beyond the page, carries a sense of longing and sacrifice familiar to the great love stories of our time. One of the story's most delightful surprises is the novel-within-the-novel that we realise we are reading when an Australian editor, Molly, living with an Italian chef, encounters Edna's story of love, loss, and what they ate. The story that unfolds between the editor and the writer is reminiscent of confrontations between master and pupil or author and subject that are familiar in coming-of-age stories such as the recent Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore film May December. As in Ian McEwan's Atonement, the lived experience of the story comes closer to tragedy than romantic comedy and the justice of love is best served when the writer uses her imagination to find the truest and most romantic ending for the story. In this way, Love Unedited is a great tribute to the courage it takes to write, and the hope we invest in books as readers.
