Canberra Writers Festival 2024 at the National Library

The Canberra Writers Festival is back for another year. Come and join us for a weekend of all things books and writing! With 8 engaging sessions across 2 days, you're sure to find something that will capture your interest and expand your knowledge.

Bookings are required for each session you wish to attend. Bookings can be made via the Canberra Writers Festival website.

Spend your free time between the sessions relaxing on our Podium, grabbing a bite to eat or a coffee at Bookplate, or picking up a book from our Bookshop.

Over the Canberra Writers Festival weekend, if you book a table for lunch at Bookplate you'll get 10% off. You'll also get 10% off titles by any of the authors appearing at the Library events in our Bookshop across the Festival weekend. 

Program

Saturday 26 October

10:30 am – Family Legacies and Literary Vandals | 60mins

PROGRAM UPDATE: Richard Fidler will no longer be appearing in this event. 



One hundred years ago, a New York bookseller committed a crime against history - he broke up the world’s grandest book, the Gutenberg Bible, and sold it off in individual pages. This is the story of an Australian man’s hunt for those fragments, and his family’s debt to an act of literary vandalism. Join author Michael Visontay and Geordie Williamson for a bookish detective story.

12:30 pm – Continuity and Connection | 60mins

Singer, songwriter, storyteller: Nardi Simpson is a glorious polymath. She wowed Australian readers with her debut novel, Song of the Crocodile. Now she is back with an exquisite new story, The Belburd, which braids together past, present and future. Melissa Lucashenko joins Nardi to discuss the craft and power of interwoven narratives. Hosted by Julieanne Lamond. 

2:30 pm – Law Breakers | 60mins

Shankari Chandran and Suzie Miller are two of the most talented writers in the country. One is a Miles Franklin award-winning novelist, the other a globally-celebrated playwright. Both explore important social justice issues in their work. They each have a background as human rights lawyers. Is that a coincidence? Nicole Abadee uses her own legal training to investigate how writing can bring about social change.  

4:00 pm – The Edge of Forgetting | 60mins

What debt do we owe to the past and its secrets? Andra Putnis and Tess Scholfield-Peters have both grappled with this question in their family memoirs - twin tales of extraordinary grandparents. History devotee, Kate Evans, joins Andra and Tess for a discussion of loss, resilience, secrecy, occupation, migration and the slippery ethics of storytelling (recorded for Radio National’s The Bookshelf).

Sunday 27 October

10:00 am – Book Tales | 60mins

It’s a morning for book lovers at the National Library: twin tales of book collectors and book binders. Gail Holmes’s debut novel, In the Margins, is drawn from the life of Frances Wolfreston, the woman who preserved the earliest part of Shakespeare’s legacy. She joins Pip Williams, whose latest novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho, explores another little-known slice of bookish history - the bindery at Oxford University Press. In conversation with Nicole Abadee. 

12:00 pm – Your Favourites, Michelle de Krester | 60mins

What happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art? Join the magnificent Michelle de Kretser – one of Australia’s most celebrated writers – for a discussion of her new book, Theory and Practice, which bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes. In conversation with Bernadette Brennan.

2:00 pm – Drongos, Drop bears and Dictionaries | 60mins

Grab your budgie smugglers and hop aboard the mateship, it is time to talk Aussie argot. Words underpin the myths and stereotypes of our national identity; they have also obscured harsh realities and inequalities. Join Australian National Dictionary Centre Director, Dr Amanda Laugesen, and beloved novelist Pip Williams, author of The Dictionary of Lost Words, for a linguistic feast. In conversation with Terri-Ann White.

3:30 pm – Language as Archive | 60mins

Before British colonisation, there were more than 250 languages spoken on this continent. Less than half survive today, and most of them are under threat. In a live episode of their hit podcast, Archive Fever, historians Yves Rees and Clare Wright are joined by special guests Cheryl Leavy and Paul Girrawah House to discuss orality as archive: how language helps us know the past and why the work of language revitalisation – bringing languages back to life – is so vital to the future.

This event is being presented in partnership with the Canberra Writers Festival. The National Library of Australia is proud to be a foundation partner.

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