This eccentric, eclectic and electric anthology represents the last ten years of the National Young Writers’ Festival (NYWF). Play scripts and poems jostle beside cartoons and zines playing truth-or-dare with essays and fictions. Featuring well known and lesser-known talent signifies the NYWF ethos – ‘open to all’ and ‘infectiously participatory’.

‘All Bogans Here’, an essay by Anna Funder, recounts the NYWF session, ‘Smarter than your average bogan’; irreverent and hilarious, a celebration of the bogan within. Shaun Tan shows fantastical otherworlds in three drawings, ‘Moral Lessons: #12, #32 & #7’. A discourse on the ethics of online media and user-generated content in the wide-web 2.0 world is the theme of Andrew Lowenthal’s ‘Free Media Vs. Free Beer’ and is reflected wickedly by Ianto Ware’s zine extract ‘You Will Not Find Tintin on Facebook’.

The NYWF is a platform for showing off the imagination and possibilities of new Australian writing. Herding Kites is but a tiny peep at a miscellany of writers and what happens when they converge on a quiet NSW town with words and ideas to make noise and wreak havoc.