I’ve long harboured what’s now an unfashionable affection for the politician, diarist and columnist formally known as The Real Mark Latham. His politics are incoherent and the few hundred words he had in the Financial Review hardly gave him the scope needed to address this. Naively, I thought an hour-long ‘conversation’ with Jonathan Green at the Melbourne Writers Festival might illuminate how such an intelligent man deals with these seemingly irreconcilable inconsistencies. Instead, the audience got Latham Unfiltered.

Sunday 29 August. Kim Stanley Robinson sat calmly at the front of the vast reaches of BMW edge. Lucy Sussex – a longtime supporter of Overland – interviewed Robinson in a freewheeling discussion about his work and opinions. It’s not surprising that that the hall wasn’t full: Robinson was the Guest of Honour at the […]

I’m writing a PhD on Indigenous Australia and have been travelling the Top End researching for six months or so. The Melbourne Writers Festival began the very day after I arrived home. Given the topic of my PhD, attending the Writing Indigenous Australia seminar seemed like an appropriate thing to do. The panel was made […]

MWF session: A year for Australian writing This session had it all, from heckling to backslapping, from scholarly commentary to dogged insistence. It was what you could call a well-rounded experience. Funnily, looking back, the topic, based on the publication of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, […]

2.30 at Fed Square and there’s a queue fifty people strong cluttering up the paving-stones, waiting to go in to ACMI for the Melbourne Writers Festival. The doors are shut. Chaos reigns. ‘Is this the museum?’ asks a lost tourist. The MWF volunteers are doing a sterling job, blithely ignoring any queue-disgruntlement and pointing the […]