Sydney Writers' Festival

I'm not sure what I like most about the announcement for the lineup of this year's Sydney Writers' Festival. Maybe it is that they have The Chaser team performing a few shows. Or maybe it is that unlike the Perth Writers' Festival, the Sydney Writers' Festival is written correctly.

Now as usual the festival has accumulated local and visiting authors and a bunch of reporters to create the week long line-up. In between the "OMG Wikileaks", Climate Change and politics presentations, they actually have the genre represented by the Crime genre. At the head of the festival's Crime genre is Michael Connelly. For a list of highlights click here.

Michael Connelly in mandatory cool writer's pose

Now I am of course thinking about going and have a list of events lined up already, and the organisers have pulled out all stops in order to appeal to my inner literary snob. Fortunately my MD prescribes a particularly powerful drug to suppress my inner snob, so I'll mainly be attending for the writing workshops and the Crime writing events.

For all of you who are overseas I should give a little background to the Sydney Writers' Festival, and Australian Writers' Festivals in general. The Sydney Writers' Festival is one of the biggest writers' events in the world, definitely the biggest in Australia. Australia has a relatively high proportion of readers in the population and the Aussie government prides itself on secularizing the industry despite evidence to suggest we'd be better off with out their protectionist agenda. So as a result this festival will attract readers, writers, reporters, and cling-ons to discuss books by the thousands. Some of the books they will be discussing will have actually sold a few copies.

I'm looking forward to it. If you are going email me, maybe we'll be able to have a tête-à-tête over a coffee. That's what literary people do isn't it? Told you these drugs were strong.