Sydney Writers' Festival

From the award-winning novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn, Patsy is the brave and stirring saga of a Jamaican woman who upends her life for a new start in America, leaving her young child behind. Fellow author Alexander Chee calls Pasty a “stunningly powerful intergenerational novel about the price – the ransom really – women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity”. Nicole joins Santilla Chingaipe to discuss her portrait of a queer black woman grasping for self-determination. A passionate and fiercely urgent story, Paty traces the silent threads of love that stretch across years and oceans. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From summer flings and first crushes to slow-burning romances – these three authors know what it takes to write a nuanced queer love story. Sophie Gonzales (Only Mostly Devastated) and Anna Whateley (Peta Lyre’s Rating Normal) have written warm, funny and occasionally awkward stories of LGBTIQA+ teens figuring life out. They join Erin Gough to discuss queer perspectives on love story clichés and why their depictions of high school life have resonated so strongly with a new generation of readers.  This conversation is part of our YA podcast series. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A masterful collection of horizons, departures, heartbreaks and seductions by one of Australia’s short-fiction greats, Josephine Rowe’s Here Until August spans Montreal and Western Australia. It follows the fates of characters who, by choice or by force, are travelling beyond the boundaries of their known worlds. It has been widely lauded, including by Miles Franklin Award–winner Michelle de Kretser, who wrote, “In their steady excavation of intimacy, these spacious stories bring Alice Munro to mind”. Stephanie Bishop meets Josephine to discuss this lyrical, nuanced and scintillating collection. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, there’s a long tradition of writing about eventful summers where personal crises unfold across long days and languid nights. Ronnie Scott’s The Adversary is a summer novel about young people exploring their sexuality and sociability. Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea is the story of a young woman’s fraught final summer in Sydney. Rebecca Harkins-Cross asks two these exciting young authors about how the intensity, transience and torpor of the season plays a role in their new novels and in literature at large. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

An exposé by Disaster Capitalism author Antony Loewenstein, Pills, Powder, and Smoke traverses the streets of London, the killing fields of Central America and the cocaine routes of West Africa to uncover a failed policy and ask who it really profits. According to journalist Johann Hari, “anyone who cares about the war on drugs … should read this superb book right away”. With George Dertadian, Antony discusses how the war on drugs focuses on controlling markets and people rather than ending addiction, and argues for a more humane approach. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s Stella Prize-winning memoir The Erratics, two sisters reckon with the convalescence and death of their outlandishly tyrannical mother and the care of their psychologically terrorised father. Darkly comic and savagely honest, The Erratics possesses the tightly coiled, compressed energy of an explosive device. A debut author in her 70s, Vicki Laveau-Harvie talks with ABC’s Ange Lavoipierre about this true story set against the natural beauty of remote Canada, which shatters precedents of grief, anger and family trauma with surprising tenderness and humour. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s I Choose Elena and Ellena Savage’s Blueberries interrogate what it means to make one’s way through the world as a woman, within its structures of power and oppression. Lucia's powerful memoir explores how trauma affects the body, bringing to our attention its cyclical, intergenerational nature. Ellena’s blend of personal essay, polemic, prose poetry, true-crime journalism and confession considers class and capitalism versus art and freedom. These two exciting young Australian authors discuss their work with Maeve Marsden. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Uncanny Valley is Anna Wiener’s prescient, page-turning account of our digital age. Set against the backdrop of our generation’s very own gold rush, Anna retells her days in San Francisco’s 2010s Silicon Valley culture, which Rebecca Solnit describes as “like Joan Didion at a startup”. Now a contributor to The New Yorker, Anna joins NITV’s Science and Technology Editor Rae Johnston to discuss a debut that is at once a bitingly funny critique of Silicon Valley and a disarmingly honest account of the tensions between old and new, art and tech, the quest for money and the quest for meaning.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mainstream media has long been guilty of not giving enough exposure to Indigenous stories and failing to prioritise the voices of Indigenous reporters. In this podcast from the Stories Worth Telling series, hear from a panel of leading journalists as they celebrate excellence in Indigenous reporting around the world and consider what changes are needed to see better First Nations representation in leading media networks. Featuring Warlpiri journalist and co-host of NITV’s The Point Rachael Hocking, Anishinaabe and Polish Canadian journalist and All Our Relations author Tanya Talaga in conversation with Kamilaroi/Dunghutti journalist and co-founder of the Tiddas4Tiddas podcast Marlee Silva. Stories Worth Telling is a series created by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and Sydney Writers’ Festival. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fascists Among Us by Walkley Award–winning writer Jeff Sparrow is the first book to trace the Christchurch massacre’s roots. Jeff untangles the history of the far right to show how fascists have adapted to 21st-century politics, and argues that the mosque killer represents a frightening new phenomenon: decentralised right-wing terrorism that recruits by committing atrocities, feeds on itself and spreads from country to country. Jeff speaks with Antony Loewenstein about his compelling, urgent call for a new response to an old menace. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As part of the Stories Worth Telling series, two of Australia’s most beloved and acclaimed magazine writers, The Australian’s Trent Dalton and Good Weekend’s Jane Cadzow, join editor Katrina Strickland to discuss the history and continued relevance of the form. Trent and Jane open up about how they research, prepare for and write long-form profiles, how they handle tricky interview subjects, and share how their craft has evolved over the course of their long careers.  Stories Worth Telling is a series created by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and Sydney Writers’ Festival. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Winner of the 2018 Costa Book of the Year Award, The Cut Out Girl is the extraordinary true story of Lien de Jong, a young Jewish girl who became one of Holland’s hidden children of World War II. While her parents were being sent to Auschwitz, Lien was being taken in by a foster family part of the Dutch resistance meant to keep children safe. But after the war, her relationship with the family abruptly ended. Decades later, Bart van Es, the grandson of the couple that took Lien in, wondered: what happened to the young girl his grandparents hid from Nazis? His investigation would change both Bart’s life and Lien’s – and bring to light a dark truth about Holland’s past. A moving account of resilience, The Cut Out Girl also explores how Holland, once a place of refuge for Jewish people, became a world of betrayal. A higher proportion of Jewish people in Holland died under Nazi occupation than those in Germany. Bart joins ABC Radio’s Sarah Kanowski to discuss this extraordinary story of war-time survival and how saviours can also scar. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the digital era where "snackable" content reigns supreme, some stories still require time and space. As part of the Stories Worth Telling series, join long-time contributor to The New Yorker and The Atlantic George Packer and award-winning author Don Watson for a wide-ranging conversation on the current state of long-form journalism. Covering everything from the history of the art form to its role in contemporary journalism, two of the form’s leading exponents discuss the power and the possibilities of deeply reported journalism. Stories Worth Telling is a series created by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and Sydney Writers’ Festival. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For more than 15 years, Walkley Award–winning journalist Sophie McNeill has reported on some of the most war-ravaged and oppressive places on earth, including Syria, Gaza and Iraq. Her memoir, We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know tells the human stories behind the headlines – from Saudi women seeking asylum to imprisoned Uyghurs and Hong Kong protesters – and reflects more broadly on what happens when evidence and facts become debatable, and why disinformation and impunity now reign supreme. Australia Director at Human Rights Watch Elaine Pearson joins Sophie in conversation.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From Canada and Brazil to Norway and Australia, the Indigenous experience in colonised nations holds startling – and deeply disturbing – similarities. The bestselling and award-winning All Our Relations: Indigenous trauma in the shadow of colonialism, by Anishinaabe and Polish Canadian journalist Tanya Talaga, skilfully folds together reportage and storytelling. In doing so, it shines a light on how racism and intergenerational trauma have produced a global crisis underscored by alarmingly high youth suicide rates. As part of the Stories Worth Telling series, Tanya speaks with Kamilaroi woman and Sydney Morning Herald Indigenous affairs reporter Ella Archibald-Binge about her powerful call for action, justice and a more equitable world for Indigenous peoples. Stories Worth Telling is a series created by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and Sydney Writers’ Festival. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.