Adelaide Writers Week
Join us on March 6 during the Adelaide Writers’ Week when the Editor of ABR will announce details of a major new sponsorship and prize to be offered this year. We can’t go into details yet, but this is an event that no common or uncommon reader, least of all Australian writers, will want to miss. We will also be launching our March issue, which is largely devoted to Art and Architecture. Luke Morgan of Monash University is co-editing the issue with Peter Rose. A highlight of this annual thematic issue is Dr Morgan’s long article on the state of art criticism in Oz, which seems likely to provoke a few Cubist expressions in the art world! This launch (a free event) will take place at 12.30 p.m. on Monday, March 6, in the West Tent, Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens.
... (read more)Geoff Dutton was a man-of-letters who for many years made (with Max Harris) Adelaide seem one of the lively centres of Australian literary culture. One thinks of him in association with the magazines Angry Penguins, Australian Letters, and the original Australian Book Review, not to mention the inauguration of an Australian publication list for Penguin Books, and then, when that soured, the setting up of Sun Books, one of the most innovative of Australian publishing ventures at that time – which was in the difficult slough period of the 1950s and 1960s and into the 1970s.
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Have you ever noticed how otherwise intelligent journalists find it almost impossible to write seriously about Adelaide Festival’s Writers’ Week? Predictably, they seem compelled to joke about the prodigious quantity of booze consumed – but perhaps they have never attended a business or an academic convention. Then well-known visiting writers apparently must be called ‘literary lions’ – an alliterative cliché suggesting that these writers are somehow not really human. There is usually some marvelling at the miracle that for once the big names (the lions) haven’t dropped out – as though there have been no Writers’ Weeks since 1976, the last time they did drop out. And inevitably there is an awkward, giggly tone to their articles, suggesting acute discomfort or embarrassment.
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