Forget the crowds, the performances, the T-shirts, the book bags; forget the misnomer ‘writers’ festival’. The business of festivals is business. In restaurants and hotel rooms publishers and agents strike deals and, like models draped across the bonnets at a car show, writers are hired to make books the sexiest commodities going.
This is why, on arriving at Sydney’s Walsh Bay to cover the seventh annual Sydney Writers’ Festival in May, I headed straight for the bookshop. And there was more to the story. This year Gleebooks, Sydney’s esteemed independent bookseller, had the sole franchise. They used to share it with the Dymocks chain, but there was dissatisfaction with that arrangement and the little guys bagged the contract.
The first morning they were just getting started. Piles of crisp new volumes were set out on tables in neat alphabetical order. I approached one of the assistants. Yes, it had been a job, she said, tendering, setting up shops (they’d be wherever the writers were), and, yes, their hopes of sales were high. Some big names were featuring: Alice Sebold, Jodi Picoult, as well as our own Helen Garner.
Having paid my respects to commerce, I left to enjoy the festival. My first job had been to find it. Two-hundred-and-forty writers were performing, in places as far as Byron Bay, Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, Parramatta in Sydney’s outer west and Cabramatta farther south. Wollongong got a look-in too. In Sydney’s centre, events were at the Town Hall, the Opera House, and the InterContinental Sydney. Most of the action, though, was at Walsh Bay, a ten-minute stroll from Circular Quay. It proved a glorious location. Clear skies, dazzling harbour—Sydney at its sundrenched, hedonistic best.
Yet some very serious people were on the program, the keynote speaker being Lewis Lapham, whose Harper’s Magazine column, discharged in his blistering, Savonarolan invective, I live for every month. There was Jared Diamond, promoting his latest book, Collapse, and Tariq Ali on the two lethal fundamentalisms—enough on the parlous state of the world to entice even a Cassandra like me. And these aside, Gillian Slovo was a guest.
Her novel Ice Road was one of my best reads of late, so I focused on stalking Slovo and chasing Lapham.
The question on everyone’s lips these days is: does Slovo’s kind of novel sell? A writer friend recently announced with a mordant laugh that literary fiction was dead. As it