Readings.com.au: Melbourne Writers Festival

MWF wrap-up: Overall bestselling books, Ned Kelly Awards & the John Button Prize

2010-09-06T00:00:00Z

The 25th Melbourne Writers' Festival wrapped up over the weekend with more awards announcements and lots of long signing queues.

The winners of the Ned Kelly awards for crime writing were announced on Friday night with Wyatt by Garry Disher winning the best fiction award, King of the Cross by Mark Dapin winning best first fiction, Pitcairn: Paradise Lost Publisher by Kathy Marks winning for best true crime, 'Leaving the Fountainhead' by Zane Lovitt winning the SD Harvey Short Story competition and Peter Doyle being given the lifetime achievement award.

The John Button Prize for writing on politics and public policy was also awarded on Friday night, prior to Noel Pearson's John Button oration, to Peter Sutton for his work of non-fiction The Politics of Suffering.

Mark Rubbo with Ian Thorpe - who's Fountain for Youth part-funded the books by Neil Murray, Archie Roach and Shane Howard.

Saturday's festival event with Neil Murray, Archie Roach and Shane Howard talking about their picture books adapted from their famous songs - My Island Home, Took The Children Away and Solid Rock - was a highlight of the weekend and resulted in lots of sales of the three books as can be seen in the top ten books of the festival.

Here is the list of the top ten bestselling books from the entire 2010 festival.

Lovesong — Alex Miller
Took The Children Away — Archie Roach
My Island Home — Neil Murray
Trick Of The Dark — Val McDermid
Solid Rock — Shane Howard
Atlantic: The Biography Of An Ocean — Simon Winchester
Inheritance — Nicholas Shakespeare
The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories Of Personal Triumph From The Frontiers Of Brain Science (Revised Edition) — Norman Doidge
From Here To There: A Father And Son Roadtrip From Melbourne to London — Jack and Jon Faine
Lights Out In Wonderland — DBC Pierre

China 'rockstar' Miéville at the signing table.

China handing over a signed copy book.

Jon Faine with Readings Managing Director Mark Rubbo.

Jack and Jon Faine signing their book* From Here To There.

The signing queue for Bryce Courtney.

Bryce Courtney signing.

Charlie Pickering and Tony Martin.

Jana Wendt signing.

Jonathon Watts with copies of When A Billion Chinese Jump

Kristel Thornell, Rebecca James and Glenda Guest.

Steve Toltz.

Neil Murray and Archie Roach signing.

Raimond Gaita signing Gaza: Law, Morality And Politics.

Miguel Syjuco, Catherine Lim and R.J. Ellory.

Bestselling books at the first weekend of MWF 2010

2010-08-30T00:00:00Z

With the first weekend of the Melbourne Writers' Festival for 2010 behind us we can now take a look at the biggest selling books from the opening days.

The biggest signing queues outside the Readings festival bookshop in the Atrium of Fed Square were for crime writer Val McDermid (pictured left), The Age Book of the Year award winner Alex Miller, Norman Doidge, Jostein Gaarder and DBC Pierre - who was surprisingly coherent even after finishing off some red wines at his event that was strangely programmed at 10am on Saturday morning.

Bestselling book of MWF 2010: Weekend One

Trick Of The Dark — Val McDermid
Atlantic: The Biography Of An Ocean — Simon Winchester
Lovesong (small paperback edition) — Alex Miller
The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories Of Personal Triumph From The Frontiers Of Brain Science (Revised Edition) — Norman Doidge
Lights Out In Wonderland — DBC Pierre
Hawke: The Prime Minister — Blanche D'Alpuget
Lovesong — Alex Miller
Public Life, Private Grief — Mary Delahunty
Ten Hail Marys — Kate Howarth
The Castle In The Pyrenees — Jostein Gaarder

Blanche D'Alpuget and Bob Hawke

Jostein Gaarder

DBC Pierre

Waleed Aly and Malcolm Fraser after their Big Ideas event at the Capitol Theatre.

For more photos from the Melbourne Writers Festival check out our MWF album on Facebook.

Bestselling books of the 2009 Melbourne Writers Festival

2009-08-31T00:00:00Z

Following on from Nam Le selling the most books at last year's writers festival, another local author - Steven Amsterdam - had done the same thing at the 2009 festival. After winning the Age Book of the Year award with Things We Didn't See Coming, Amsterdam beat out visiting international authors Bernhard Schlink, Thomas Buergenthal and Anne Michaels to sell the most books at our festival bookshop at Federation Square.

Here's the top ten selling books from the entire 2009 Melbourne Writers Festival:

Things We Didn't See Coming — Steven Amsterdam
A Lucky Child — Thomas Buergenthal
The Bee Hut — Dorothy Porter
Guilt About the Past — Bernhard Schlink
Raft — Howard Goldenberg
The Winter Vault — Anne Michaels
Swimming — Enza Gandolfo
The House Of Wittgenstein: A Family At War — Alexander Waugh
The Lost Mother: A Story of Art and Love — Anne Summers
The Lieutenant — Kate Grenville

MWF Report M.J. Hyland in conversation

2009-08-29T00:00:00Z

You just don’t expect Booker-shortlisted authors to get nervous but M.J. Hyland was visibly anxious and in fact outed herself as so only a few minutes into yesterday’s in conversation with Michael Williams at BMW Edge. Quite unlike the first-person narrators of her novels Maria Hyland talked not sparsely but with exuberance as if she wanted to speak all her words at the one time.

She read from the very beginning of new novel This Is How with a slightly trembly voice and then told us that the idea had grown from one of the true stories documented in a book called Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers by Tony Parker about a young guy who lived in a boarding house and one night, for seemingly no reason, murdered one of his fellow lodgers.

Michael Williams was on hand to settle the nerves and he asked Maria about the similarity between This Is How and the 1977 John Cheever novel Falconer, which like parts of This Is How follows one man’s experience in prison. Maria said she had read Falconer during the writing of her own novel and subsequently scaled back the explorations of homosexuality in prison in her own book so as to avoid too many similarities between the novels.

In the Q and A at the end of the session Maria was asked whether taking a writing workshop with prisoners during a visit to one of the two prisons that she was researching for the book had influenced the way she taught creative writing at the University of Manchester. She said she got the prisoners to do a writing exercise where they wrote about their last day of freedom and included one lie in their stories. Then the other prisoners had to try to guess which part of the story was the untruth. This was her way of finding out what the prisoners were in for – something she had been warned by the guards not to enquire after – and it worked so well that she now uses this exercise during her creative writing classes.

MWF report: ‘Crossing Over’, RMIT students made good

2009-08-24T00:00:00Z

RMIT has an impressive reputation for turning out writers of note. This session, chaired by author and RMIT staffer Catherine Cole, only underlines their success.

Carrie Tiffany’s debut novel, Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and the Orange Prize. Toni Jordan’s ‘literary romantic comedy’ Addition has sold into multiple countries, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin and was selected for Richard and Judy’s Book Club in the UK, guaranteeing her sales of 10,000 plus copies there. Kalinda Ashton’s first novel, The Danger Game (currently Readings Australian Book of the Month) was launched to widespread critical acclaim, and she was mentored by Christos (The Slap) Tsiolkas throughout. Nick Maxwell is a chief writer on Rove, responsible for the satirical segment ‘Kevin Rudd, PM’, about the unlikely weekly adventures of a manic, high-voiced version of our prime minister.

Carrie spoke movingly about her love of reading, and the way it allows her to escape to other worlds. ‘If I was given a choice between never reading again, or never writing again, I would ditch writing.’

She talked about moving with her family from Yorkshire to Perth, aged six, and that although they were ‘a TV family, not a book family’, they brought with them a leatherbound copy of the works of Charles Dickens, which gathered dust on a bookshelf until, following her parents’ split, she found solace and escape within its pages. ‘It was the first time I experienced the sensation of my mind crossing over into a place with no actual geography – the imagination.’

Toni Jordan (pictured above) talked about her approach to writing and readers, and her decision to write intelligent literary fiction for time-poor readers who valued words and construction, but were primarily looking for a good story. She was inspired by seeing a good friend – a very intelligent woman who worked in science – move from reading Margaret Atwood and co in her twenties to Marion Keyes in her thirties, as she married and had kids. ‘The middle ground is for me,’ she concluded.

Nick Maxwell, a somewhat anxious, furiously self-deprecating, utterly charming speaker, talked about crossing over to ‘some kind of dark side’ by writing for television. He said the medium had been both helpful and unhelpful. The good thing is that it got him organised as a writer, and weekly propels him past self-doubt to deliver a finished product, ‘because if you didn’t, there’d be a black screen’. The bad side, he reflected, was that ‘you don’t get the time and audience to make something you really feel is the best it can be’. The best result for his writing is that it’s taught him ‘to be concise with language’.

And finally, Kalinda Ashton (left) talking about ‘crossing over’ from being a writer of plays and short fiction to novels. She said that novel writing was interesting in that she experienced ‘a closing off of options, a limiting of choices’ as she progressed through the work. ‘Each incidental decision early on has later consequences.’ Interestingly, sorting out minor issues to do with the consistency of the book often evolved into major changes that would alter what Ashton called ‘the fulcrum’ of the novel. For instance, one of the three main characters, Jeremy, the brother of the two sisters at the core of the novel, was only introduced as a character in his own right after his sister mentions seeing someone who reminds her ‘of her dead brother Jeremy’, which led Ashton to reflect that perhaps she needed to mention Jeremy again later on. In the final product, Jeremy is the narrator who both introduces and closes the book.

‘I never meant to work in three narrative voices and two time frames to write this novel,’ she said. ‘But I did.’

Bestselling books from MWF Week One

2009-08-24T00:00:00Z

Steven Amsterdam's apperance at the Melbourne Writers Festival and the annoucement that his book Things We Didn't See Coming had won the Age Book of the Year award saw the book sell more than any other book at the Readings festival bookshop at Federation Square over the first MWF weekend.

Things We Didn't See Coming — Steven Amsterdam
Raft — Howard Goldenberg
Guilt About The Past — Bernhard Schlink
The Winter Vault — Anne Michaels
The Lost Mother: A Story of Art and Love — Anne Summers
The Lieutenant — Kate Grenville
D-Day: The Battle For Normandy — Antony Beevor
The Horse Boy: A Father's Quest To Heal His Son — Rupert Isaacson
Murder In Amsterdam: The Death Of Theo Van Gogh And The Limits Of Tolerance — Ian Buruma
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One — David Kilcullen

MWF report: Ian Buruma’s alternate keynote address

2009-08-23T00:00:00Z

Ian Buruma presents as a conventional man. He took the stage of the Melbourne Town Hall wearing a brown suit jacket, grey shirt, navy trousers and black lace-up shoes. But if you glanced at his ankles, you’d notice a flash of fire-engine red socks.

It’s an interesting touch for a man who leaves me with the impression that he’s one of the most sensible speakers I’ve heard in a long while. Which may sound dull, but it’s not at all – quite the opposite. Buruma is not ‘sensible’ as in safe, or careful not to take risks. He’s ‘sensible’ in that he makes logical, clear-headed sense, speaking about a topic that many find it difficult to be clear-headed about.

He started off by referring to the explosion in ‘instant experts’ on Islam after 9/11. ‘I cannot completely exclude myself from this category,’ he admits, to wry laughter. The work that lands Buruma in this category is Murder in Amsterdam, an absolutely brilliant – and gripping – book in which he tackles the thorny issues of post-9/11 politics, Islam and freedom of speech, through the lens of one shocking, high profile case.

Ian Buruma signing in the Town Hall foyer after his alternate keynote speech.

Deliberately provocative filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic extremist for a film he made with anti-Islam, Somali-born politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was raised as a Muslim and sought asylum in Holland after her family forced her into an arranged marriage. Her experience of life in a liberal western democracy caused her to gradually question, then reject, her faith. The film dramatised what Ali interpreted as Islamic abuse of women by projecting carefully chosen verses from the Koran over images of naked female bodies. In his book, Buruma talks to key players in the affair, including Ali, and investigates the incident from all angles – not to make a political point, but to look for answers.

Modestly, Buruma didn’t talk about his book directly, but about the issues it explores. After 9/11, Islam – and Islamic immigrants – was feared as posing a threat to ‘liberal values’. He cited the example of Dutch politician, Fritz Bolkestein, famously declared that ‘some values, such as the separation of church and state, or gender equality, are non-negotiable’.

‘Values are always being negotiated,’ argued Buruma. ‘The wearing of the headscarf is one example. I can’t see it as something that will bring Western civilisation down. Even clerics who won’t shake hands with a woman should be tolerated. I don’t think we should get hysterical about things like this. I think one can tolerate groups of people who do not conform to the rules that govern our society, so long as they don’t try to impose them on society, or have that as a goal.’

Buruma said he ‘draws the line’ at violence, and used the rule of thumb that ‘if there is a difference between law and custom, the law must prevail’.

‘We cannot expect to live in a society where everyone has the same rules and values.’

He talked about Salman Rushdie’s creed, that you can criticise the belief but not insult the believer. In other words – argue with Islam, but don’t denounce Muslims. Though he agreed with this in theory, Buruma pointed out that this isn’t always possible to follow. ‘To a true believer, this distinction doesn’t exist. It’s part of your identity, part of who you are.’

However, he concluded, ‘a liberal democratic society can demand that they learn to live with this distinction.’

MWF Review: Bernhard Schlink on Guilt About the Past

2009-08-22T00:00:00Z

The queue to hear keynote speaker Bernhard Schlink, much-loved author of The Reader, snaked down the steps of the Melbourne Town Hall, out the door, onto Swanston Street, and around the corner up Collins Street.

He spoke about the topic he explores in his latest book of essays, Guilt About the Past. Of course, questions about the Holocaust and the degree of culpability borne by the ordinary German people permeate his novels, too: both The Reader and the more recent Homecoming, in which the main character discovers that the father he’d always thought was dead is in fact alive and living in America, and had close ties to the Nazi regime.

Bernhard Schlink signing books after his keynote speech.

Schlink spoke about the guilt of ordinary Germans who had not been involved with the Nazi regime, nor been in a position to offer resistance or opposition to the regime. He used the term “guilt through solidarity” – a guilt accrued purely by association (or solidarity) with those responsible for the Holocaust, either parents or grandparents or by identifying with the culture and the nation responsible.

There is a correspondence (though certainly not an equality), he said, between the trauma inherited by the children of victims and the guilt inherited by the children of perpetrators. They are united by the same crime. The children of perpetrators don’t owe the children of victims an apology, but they do owe “tact and respect for the other’s feelings”.

In fact, Schlink believes that the next generation cannot ask for, or give, forgiveness for the crimes or sufferings of generations past. On the other hand, reconciliation is possible between these subsequent, differently marked generations.

“While forgiveness lifts the burden of guilt from the guilty party, reconciliation makes the burden lighter,” he said.

Free MWF event on parallel importation

2009-08-21T00:00:00Z

The Melbourne Writers Festival has added a free event discussing the proposed changes to the parallel importation laws to the program. Here's the details of the event, on this Saturday evening.

Restrictions on Parallel Imports: To remove or not to remove?

Never has a topic energised the publishing, bookselling and writing industry as has the Productivity Commission’s report into the restrictions on parallel imports of books. The report came out after the festival program went to print so we have added an extra event - our response to the PC’s report.

This free event is on Saturday 22 August at 7pm - 8pm in ACMI Cinema 2, Federation Square.

Dr Mark Davis from the Dept of Culture & Communications, University of Melbourne will be in the chair of what I’m sure will be an illuminating debate.

Speaking on the topic will be Ms Gabrielle Coyne, Managing Director, Penguin Group, Mr Peter Donoughue, ex-Managing Director of Wiley Australia and industry blogger, Professor Allan Fels, Dean Australian and NZ School of Government and ex-Chairman of the ACCC, Mr Sandy Grant, CEO, Hardie Grant Books and Mr David Vodicka, The Rubber Group of Companies.

MWF 2009 Launch

2009-07-22T00:00:00Z

With the program for this year's festival now out here's a video from MWF featuring Festival Director Rosemary Cameron launching this year's main author attractions.

Win a Trip for 2 to the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali

2009-07-21T00:00:00Z

Spend over $50 at the Readings bookshop in the Atrium at Federation Square during the 2009 Melbourne Writers Festival, and go in the draw to win a trip for two to the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali, valued at over $5000*.

The Readings bookshop will be open every day of the festival, from August 21st.

Prize courtesy of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival and Readings Books, Music and Film.

Readings is the Official Bookseller at the 2009 Melbourne Writers Festival.

*Conditions apply.

WordPlay @ ArtPlay

2008-09-10T00:00:00Z

Wordplay at ArtPlay took place during the writers' festival and saw a variety of authors and illustrators (including Roland Harvey, pictured below) taking workshops and creative games with kids aged 7-12. Esther Van Doornum took these lovely pics of the Wordplaying down at Artplay on the banks of the Yarra at Birrarung Marr.

Andrew Davies in conversation with Jan Sardi: Session Review

2008-09-03T00:00:00Z

Andrew Davies will probably go down in history as the man who had the epoch-makingly brilliant idea of putting Mr. Darcy into a wet and thus clingily transparent blouse. But the blinding success of his version of Pride and Prejudice aside, he has also written the scripts for many of the great and memorable TV and film adaptations of the past decades: House of Cards, Middlemarch, The Line of Beauty, Bleak House, Tipping the Velvet, Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Tailor of Panama, to name only a few. He spoke to Australian screenwriter Jan Sardi (Shine) about the delicate art of adaptation and what it’s like to be the writer who channels Dickens and Austen for the contemporary world.

The session opened with the screening of a ‘teaser’, in every sense of the word, from the beginning of the BBC’s 2008 Sense and Sensibility (yet to be seen on free-to-air Australian television.) It’s a sexual seduction scene between a young girl and a man whose face isn’t revealed, and needless to say, it’s not a scene that’s written in Austen’s novel (Austen has the seduction happen well and truly offstage.) As an illustration of Davies’ method the clip showed his willingness to stretch, bend, and generally play fast and loose with the material supplied by even a novel as well-known and revered as this, to be a little bit saucy even when adapting Austen, in the interests of making a wonderful novel catch the attention of a television audience with itchy remote control fingers.

Jan Sardi asked just the right questions of Davies, drawing out his views and feelings about the novels he works with, his sense of exactly what his task is as an adaptor, and the cheerful confidence and aplomb with which he seems to make some extraordinarily difficult calls.

Before becoming a writer Davies taught English in schools and universities, and I got the sense that he still unashamedly thinks in terms of an educational mission – the basic value of opening up unfamiliar books for novice readers matters more to him than preserving all the superficially off-putting and remote dignity of books written hundreds of years ago in disused language.

It was extremely refreshing to hear him acknowledge the value of this unfashionable ideal, and he has done more than anyone alive to keep books like Middlemarch and Bleak House in front of readers. He spoke rather delightfully about his efforts to ensure Bleak House would be accessible to children. But, of course, when he talked in more detail about what he’s done with Sense and Sensibility (which I’ve seen on DVD) it grew complicated. He has made the two heroes more heroic and Willoughby more of “a shit”, feeling that without these changes the men are “seriously underwritten” and we don’t understand why the women are interested in them.

I think Davies is right that the novel has serious structural problems, but failure to clearly communicate what Marianne sees in Colonel Brandon isn’t one of them, because the novel says, as clear as crystal, that she doesn’t see much in him at all. This is a case of adapting storytelling to the demands and conditions of a new medium, but it’s also an example of a revision that softens away the radically unromantic quality of the original novel and that’s rather a wrench. The visual and emotional beauty of the series will certainly bring new readers to Sense and Sensibility but will they find the novel they were expecting?

Asked why he does so many classic novel adaptations rather than modern ones, Davies gave an answer I liked: he simply prefers them. The Line of Beauty, which Davies optioned on his own behalf, seems to have struck him as somewhat exceptional among modern novels in terms of having both strong plotting and psychologically interesting characters. In general, he suggested, modern fiction of the prize-winning, book-clubbing kind is thinly plotted, and airport novels have flimsy characters. The classics have both, and that’s why they have stuck around.

The session closed with Andrew Davies describing the delightfully Narnian beginning to the working day that he now enjoys, a recitation that must have struck envy into quite a few hearts of those in the audience. Having bought the Edwardian house adjoining his own to use as an office, to go to work in the morning Davies steps into the built-in wardrobe in the corner of the bedroom, passes through the clothes and through a hole knocked into the wall, and climbs out of the identical wardrobe next door. If a morning of writing goes well, he said, he hops back through the hole and goes back into bed.

Laura Carroll teaches in the English Program at La Trobe University.

Art and Motherhood: Session Review

2008-09-03T00:00:00Z

This session on ‘art and motherhood’ was ably chaired by poet Alicia Sometimes, who admitted that the very same morning, in a sleep deprived haze, she had poured boiling water on her toast. This introduction provoked much laughter and nodding from the predominantly female audience.

Rachel Power, author of The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood said that as a writer, her experience of becoming a mother intensified her need to express herself; however she was unprepared for the ‘sheer workload that comes with having children’. She also raised the question that plagues working mums, not just those involved in the arts, of how to keep your own needs at the forefront of your life.

The irrepressible comedian and writer Catherine Deveny said in no uncertain terms artist-mothers need to ‘…do the writing/creative act first, before the housework’. Poet Lisa Gorton also evoked laughter when she said she had written ‘an entire poem just about sleeping in.’ Singer-songwriter and mother of three (including twins) Clare Bowditch talked about the collaboration necessary between father/mother and extended family to support the creative act.

For more reading about artist mothers, The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood has interviews with twenty-six artist/mothers in the fields of literary, visual and performing arts.

Bestselling books of the 2008 MWF

2008-09-01T00:00:00Z

The festival is over for another year and here is the complete list of bestselling books from the Readings Festival Bookshop that has been in the Atrium of Fed Square for the past ten days:

The Boat by Nam Le
American Journeys by Don Watson
On Rage by Germaine Greer
When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris
Stray Dog Winter by David Francis
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
On Experience by David Malouf
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
The General: CHERUB Book 10 by Robert Muchamore

Authors of the 2nd Weekend

2008-09-01T00:00:00Z

The Atrium at Federation Square was regularly packed with queues of people waiting to get book signed by various authors outside the Readings bookshop.

Blanche d'Alpuget was signing copies of her little book with a big theme On Longing.

Michelle de Kretser and David Malouf attracted the longest signing queue all weekend.

Kate Atkinson signs her latest book.

Andy Griffiths was playing with the kids at Wordplay @ Artplay over the weekend.

Robert Muchamore @ MWF

2008-08-29T00:00:00Z

UK author Robert Muchamore has been in Australia for the Melbourne Writers Festival and is now embarking on a nation-wide tour to promote The General - book number ten in the CHERUB series, massively popular with teenagers across the globe. I spoke to him just after his final session in the Schools Program at the MWF about the special CHERUB novella Dark Sun which was published in the UK as part of World Book Day earlier this year.

Have you seen many copies of Dark Sun brought in to be signed during the festival?

I’ve signed a fair few but there is a level of frustration with the kids because its not just on general sale and not every kid can get it. So what we’ll do – we have to wait a year after the book day thing has happened because that’s the deal we signed with them in Britain – but what I think we’ll do is have it as a PDF download on the website so every CHERUB fan will eventually just be able to download it and read it.

Is this your first trip to Australia?

I’ve been to Australia before. I’ve not done author events. I’ve got a sister who lives up in Queensland so I’ve been to visit her four or fives times over the years. But this is the first time I’ve done an author visit with a festival and signings.

How have you found the Melbourne fans?

They seem to be incredible. I’ve just done a signing down there [at Fed Square] and kid after kid was pulling out battered old [CHERUB] copies that they’ve all read 20 times and stuff like that which I think is fantastic.

Any thoughts on the writers’ festival itself?

It’s interesting because I did a radio interview yesterday and Rosemary was in the studio before I was and she was comparing it to the Edinburgh festival in Britain which they say is the biggest in the world. But I was at the Edinburgh festival two or three weeks ago and to be honest the size of the festival doesn’t matter. What matters is that you bring a good audience to the authors that you’ve got…With Melbourne you’ve just got a fantastic setting, everything is organised well, all the events seem to be sold out – or at the least very popular. It just seems incredible. And even if it’s not the biggest in the world, it’s certainly one of the best.

What the question from readers that you’ve come across the most here?

I think every single session we’ve had the ‘Will there be a CHERUB film released?’ and we’re hoping for 2010.

What kind of involvement will you have in the CHERUB film?

They did offer me a chance to write the script but at the time we actually sold the film rights the books hadn’t been out for as long and I still had another job and there was just no way that on top of writing the book and having the job I could do it. Probably if they offered me now I’d have a stab at writing the script. But the way it worked out and the timing of it, I just wouldn’t have been available to do it. So basically my involvement is I’ll just be a consultant if they want me to be a consultant.

Part of the inspiration for the CHERUB series was your previous job as a Private Investigator. Have you had other jobs that could have also inspired a collection of novels?

No, I’ve only really ever actually had two jobs in my life. The first one I worked in a camera shop when I was a teenager – as a Saturday job – and when I first left school that became a full-time job. And then I just got this very unusual job as a Private Investigator usually reserved for police officers. Basically they took me on as a teenager because they wanted a dog’s body: someone to take the post, answer the telephone, make their cups of coffee – and that was how I got into as a kind of office junior.

Do you think kids are drawn to the power that the kids in CHERUB have as spies?

With any children’s story the children have to be empowered in someway. I mean, if you actually wrote a book about a completely realistic teenager’s life – unless there’s some kind of heinous social drama like a mother being murdered or something like that – there’s actually not much going on: they get up, they go to school, they come home, they hang out with their mates, sometimes maybe they have a girlfriend or a fight at school, but I mean it isn’t that compelling. Most ordinary adult lives are not that compelling either. And with kids the only way you can really make the story interesting is if they’re much more empowered than kids in the real world.

Do you have a favourite CHERUB character?

Favourite CHERUB character is defintely Lauren – James’s sister – and the simple reason for that is that it’s good fun writing the scenes because they’ve got a sort of brother-sister chemistry between them where they tease each other or wind each other up and that’s just really good fun to write.

And finally do you have a favourite font to write in?

The font I use is, Adobe Garamond. But it has be Adobe Garamond not a fan one that comes from ebay.

Hamlet, Enid Blyton and Me - John Marsden with Mike Shuttleworth: Session Review

2008-08-29T00:00:00Z

Looking at John Marsden, I imagine that if I were close enough, I would see remnants of chalk dust on his clothes. (Or maybe, in these modern times, smudges of whiteboard marker.) He looks exactly like the school teacher that he is: maroon cable-knit jumper worn loosely over a checked shirt; wispy grey hair; a shuffling, bear-like amble across the stage. His easy manner with the schoolchildren massed before him is borne of long habit. You can see their teacher custodians relax as he briefly takes over.

First, though, session chair Mike Shuttleworth (from the State Library of Victoria’s Centre for Youth Literature) introduces John and provides some background on his reinvented version of Hamlet. He tells us that Marsden has just spent seven years writing it, and reminds us that the original version of the story predated Shakespeare by 400 years – and just ten years before the Bard’s version, a playwright named Thomas Kidd wrote his own.

Marsden begins by telling us that stories always remind us of other stories, and we are all storytellers in our way. “What we call conversations are exchanges of stories.” He riffs into a strong of invented conversation stories, kid-style, including things like skateboards. “There are the big stories but there are also the thousands of little stories we carry within that are so easily forgotten.”

“Our memories shape us, define us. Our stories tell us who we are. And our stories are unique. Many cultures, like the Aboriginals, didn’t write down stories, but retold them.”

He reflects that the original story of Hamlet is lost, and perhaps oral story telling is in some ways better than the Western tradition of writing things down, because it’s not so easily lost as manuscripts or books (like those in the lost library of Persepolis).

“Writing is my preferred method of creative expression. Some people dance. Not me. If I did that, I’d fall off the stage.” The sea of school uniforms ripples with laughter in response.

He moves on to tell us about how he used to make up ghost stories when teaching at a bush school, approximately 20 years ago. “There’s something quite delightful about terrifying people, I find.” Years later, he revisited the school and found that his stories still existed – albeit in a different form. They survived as truth, as living legends. He marvelled as he listened to tales that he had invented, but didn’t let on about their origin.

“Stories are about interruptions to routine.” If you get up for breakfast and everyone is there, eating, that’s not a story, he explains. But if you get up and your family has disappeared, that’s an interruption to routine – and a story!

Hamlet is a series of interruptions to routine. First, his father dies. Second, his mother remarries. And third, his father reappears, urging him to avenge his death. “MAJOR interruption to routine.”

Stories are also about changes of status, Marsden continues. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes badly. “One of the great lessons in life is learning how changes of status work.” He points out that, as the author and someone older than his audience, he has a higher status. “And because I’m a male and it’s 2008. To some extent, that’s still the way things work.”

“We love it when people lose status.” This, he says, can easily happen. “In writing a book, understanding status is everything.”

Hamlet is a young man with high status who is threatened by the actions of his stepfather and trying to deal with a very high status father figure. Hamlet has three father figures (his father, Polonius, and his stepfather/uncle). He kills two of them. “Maybe Shakespeare had problems with his own father,” Marsden jokes.

We’re all engaged with status battles with our parents, teachers and siblings, he says. Boys are engaged with status battles with their fathers that “they must win”. That battle comes for every young man. It may be a game of chess or tennis, or a fight. “If the day comes and the boy loses, he’ll forever live in the shadow of his father.”

He sums up with a few choice words on the book: “Hamlet is about identity, love, sex and becoming who you want to be. It’s about dealing with memories that your parents have passed on to you. It’s about fathers and sons.”

It’s question time. I have to say that high school students seem (judging from the few Schools Program sessions I sat in on) to ask much smarter questions than the grown-ups do.

“What was your status battle with your father?”

A curious hush descends. Marsden pauses for just a fraction of a second before answering.

“It was over the fact that my father used to beat me quite often and I said ‘you’re not going to do that anymore’. I was about 14. It was one of the defining moments of my life.” Pause. “I hope nobody here has to go through anything like that.”

Outside Kevin '08

2008-08-29T00:00:00Z

Keep your eyes out for our darling Kev the courier - keeping the wheels turning and books transferring between our Carlton and Federation Square stores for the extent of the Festival. With a specially designed Readings Crumpler bag and bright orange flag, he is hard to miss!

Characters with Spine - Melina Marchetta & Rachel Cohn: Session Review

2008-08-28T00:00:00Z

Melina Marchetta and I had to contain our girlish fandom at sharing the stage with hip YA author, Rachel Cohn, all the way from the US of A, or more precisely the very cool NYC.

We’d already gushed over having to order her latest book in from the States because we couldn’t possibly wait for an Australian edition and ‘OMG wasn’t it amazing?’ (note to all publishers – publish it here please!) and I’d gotten slightly obsessed looking up her blog posts. Luckily she blogs, updates her site and partakes in an awful lot of ‘myspacing’ as writerly procrastination.

Delightfully, the love was being reciprocated: Rachel features the brand spanking new US edition of Melina’s On the Jellicoe Road on her webpage and I’ve even been offered the sofa bed in her undoubtedly cool rent-controlled Manhattan apartment.

A session on characters couldn’t have been more suited to these two. Most Aussie readers know Melina’s beautiful Francesca from Saving Francesca or Looking for Alibrandi’s Josie, and Rachel’s characters share the same raw honesty combined with sassiness.

Melina said her ‘characters come calling’ and Rachel noted that for the protagonist of her Gingerbread series Cyd Charisse, ‘it was just a question of when she would come and kidnap my attention again’. So it seems that being ambushed by strong characters is a common way of getting started.

We talked a lot about taking characters into dark territory. Not that either of these gals has shied away from big topics before (suicide in Looking for Alibrandi; splintered families in Rachel’s Gingerbread and The Steps series; displacement for many of their characters) but their latest books, Rachel’s You Know Where to Find Me (the aforementioned had-to-be-ordered-from-the-US novel) and Melina’s 2007 On the Jellicoe Road really move into darksville. I had to take to bed to finish You Know Where to Find Me and Rachel admitted that writing it was her hardest task yet.

For Melina, her just-gone-to-the printer Finnikin of the Rock provided other challenges: a move into the realm of fantasy and a book classified as ‘crossover’ – those YA novels that cross over to adult audiences. We all agree that many YA books deserve an adult audience, as well as the critical acclaim and attention afforded ‘serious grown up authors’.

We didn’t get to the suggested theme of the session ‘Learn how to create characters that spring from the pages’ (the clock beat us), but I’m sure the audience left with many valuable tips for writing. There were questions on where you write (in a writers’ room with no internet connection for Rachel), the editing process (‘hard work but ultimately satisfying’ for Melina) and whether swearing in books is ok (‘Fuck yeah’ according to Rachel).

What we did get was a sense of the startlingly talented, strong and feisty women behind some of the best YA fiction around. And that’s my absolutely unbiased opinion.

The Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist movie, co-authored by Rachel with David Levithen, is out in Australia January 2009.

Nikki Anderson is a member of the festival’s Schools Programming Committee.