This year marks the 40th anniversary of Melbourne Writers Festival. The MWF Team is currently “gathering memories from the incredible community who has helped to build, shape and sustain MWF”.
Quoting the Festival’s e-newsletter: “Did you meet, or discover, your favourite author at MWF? Was there an unforgettable moment that you shared with a loved one? Or is there a thought-provoking conversation you still think about today?”
My fond memories started in 2015 as a MWF Audience Advocate. In the words of Lisa Dempster, that year’s artistic director:
“Each year MWF audiences bring the Festival to life by responding passionately to the ideas and writing at the heart of our events… Our ongoing dialogue with the readers of Melbourne informs so much of what we do – the style of events we deliver, the writers we invite to the Festival, the themes we cover, and even how we facilitate audience questions at events.”
Thus with the establishment of “a direct line to the Festival” for readers across Melbourne to share their ideas, I was among the lucky dozen of applicants “with diverse reading passions and a love for the Festival” selected as MWF 2015’s Audience Advocates.
In the process of what Lisa referred to as “audience-driven programming”, we met with the MWF Team regularly to discuss our views and opinions, and to contribute to the Festival’s programming and planning by bouncing around all sorts of (crazy) ideas. Curiously, these ideas were often quite different from those proposed by MWF’s industry partners.
The Festival that year turned out to be full of surprises. As Jo Case, that year’s program manager, recently recalled:
“Mark Latham was polite, even pleasant, when I spoke to him in the Melbourne Writers Festival green room. But minutes later, he was on stage calling his interviewer, Jonathan Green, an ‘ABC wanker’, and swearing at the audience. It was headline news back in 2015.”
I also remember attending the “Writing and Censorship” session at the Festival that year, where Chinese author Sheng Keyi fiercely declared: “A writer’s job is to offend, and [my book Death Fugue] was not published in China because it offended some people.” Imagine my shock when the official interpreter (mistakenly?) turned Sheng’s words from “to OFFEND” to “to DEFEND”. I alerted the MWF Team afterwards, but the damage was done.
MWF 2017 was an equally interesting experience, where I attended not just a session but also a translation workshop featuring Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi and Darryl Sterk, translator of Wu’s The Stolen Bicycle, an awesome book longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. That year also marked Lisa’s last year as the Festival’s artistic director.
I served as an Audience Advocate again for MWF 2018, and have been helping to promote the Festival ever since. As readers, perhaps we don’t get to attend the Festival every year. But we can all do our small bit to support this iconic literary festival.
Note: This article was partially published under the title “Melbourne Writers Festival” by Ranges Traders Star Mail, February 17, 2026, P.16.
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 