MWF Digital 2021
The global pandemic has created unique challenges for literary festivals seeking to meaningfully connect authors with readers. Thankfully, the brilliant minds that put together Melbourne Writers Festival have created the MWF21 Digital series for us to enjoy – even while we’re unable to come together in person.
MWF Digital allows you access to exclusive streams from some of the globe’s biggest names. Hear Pulitzer-Prize winning Jhumpa Lahiri discuss her latest novel Whereabouts and perhaps follow it up with Rachel Cusk talking about the art, privilege and female fate in Second Place. The MWF Digital program has adopted a pay-what-you-can model for access and from today (3 September) you can stream these wonderful conversations anytime, anywhere until 15 September. Browse the full list of events here and take a peek at some of our most-anticipated below.
Emma Dabiri: What White People Can Do Next
Celebrated Irish-Nigerian author Emma Dabiri’s What White People Can Do Next cuts through the noise of online discourse to offer a robust and nuanced examination of race and class. Drawing from lived experience and academic study, Dabiri expertly outlines how the idea of race was constructed to bolster capitalism, while articulating a powerful vision of how to forge a future that works for us all. See her in conversation with Santilla Chingaipe about a deeply practical treatise told with intellectual rigour and razor-sharp wit.
Find Emma Dabiri’s latest work
Sigrid Nunez: What Are You Going Through
In characteristically genre-defying style, Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through melds fiction and criticism to tell a powerful story of multiple endings: the end of a friendship, the end of a life, and the end of humanity itself. The follow-up to the American writer’s National Book Award–winning The Friend, it has been hailed a ‘gloriously meditative story’ that ‘[bursts] with wit, warmth, and human empathy’ (The Independent). She speaks with Astrid Edwards about the meaning of life, the nature of death, the power of art and the purpose of friendship.
Find Sigrid Nunez’s latest work
Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Committed
The Committed is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s keenly awaited follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sympathizer. A journey through the underworld of 1980s Paris, it shares the same narrator, a Vietnamese-French communist spy, as its predecessor and has drawn praise as ‘a treatise of global futurity in the aftermath of colonial conquest’ (Ocean Vuong) and ‘a deep, compelling and humorous portrait of how we are shaped by fictions others have for us’ (Laila Lalami). He speaks with Leah Jing McIntosh about a literary thriller spiked with absurdist humour that shines a forensic light on empire and capitalism.
Find Viet Thanh Nguyen’s latest work
Rachel Cusk: Second Place
Rachel Cusk’s breakaway Outline trilogy was heralded as nothing short of a reinvention of the novel, unfolding across a series of conversations with a withholding narrator. Her newest work, Second Place, extends the themes of female fate and male privilege to encompass the murky link between art and evil. Cusk speaks with interviewer Sophie Black about a dazzling and psychologically exacting fable of human destiny and decline, and her prolific career at large.
Find Rachel Cusk’s latest work
Rumaan Alam: Leave the World Behind
One of the year’s most talked-about books, Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind is a tautly dystopic story of a family vacation interrupted by unexpected visitors and unseen disaster. Hailed a darkly witty page-turner set against the end of the world, its fans include Carmen Maria Machado, who wrote, ‘I have not been this profoundly unnerved since Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.’ Alam speaks with Osman Faruqi about a novel seemingly tailor-made for our times, exploring race, class and privilege in a world undone by catastrophe.
Find Rumaan Alam’s latest work
