The 2026 Dandenong Ranges Literary Festival will take place in Belgrave from Friday 9 to Sunday 11 October. The festival program was recently launched at The Blacksmith, the beloved local cafe patisserie restaurant in Belgrave’s main street, and attended by dozens of enthusiastic sponsors, supporters and friends.
One of the festival’s major sponsors is the Yarra Ranges Council through its Annual Community Grants Scheme. In her speech, Community Connections officer Janette Scott highlighted the council’s continuous support for groups and organisations to deliver activities that enhance local culture and celebrate community spirit.
Another major sponsor is the Community Bank Upwey & District. Director Thomas Kern expressed his best wishes for the festival’s success while emphasising the Community Bank’s earnest efforts to give back to the community by backing local services, programs, projects and cultural and sports events.
Guest speaker Jaclyn Crupi shared her love for reading and how Melina Marchetta’s 1992 novel Looking for Alibrandi (1992) has influenced her life as an author, editor and bookseller. She is an ambassador for the 2026 Warm Winter Read campaign, and her own books, such as Planting for Native Bees, Birds and Butterflies (2025) and Garden Like a Nonno (2021), are all about finding and cultivating a place of your own.
In her speech, Crupi explained the importance of “place” in shaping characters and plots in writing. She has witnessed how the right book in the right hands at the right time can change lives. More importantly, outside-the-city events such as the Dandenong Ranges Literary Festival are both special and unique, conveying a strong sense of place and community while embodying the place where we live and thrive.
This year’s festival keynote will be delivered by Chris Hammer, the leading crime fiction novelist and author of the internationally bestselling Martin Scarsden series: Scrublands (2018), Silver (2019), Trust (2020) and Legacy (2025).
Through the recent ABC TV adaptation of Treasure and Dirt (2021), the first book in Hammer’s Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan series, readers can get a sense of the author’s renowned achievement in creating atmospheric Australian settings, colourful characters, intricate plots, descriptive language, and emotional depth.
Other bestselling authors to appear in this year’s festival include but are not limited to Sally Hepworth, whose latest novel Mad Mabel (2025) won the General Fiction Book of the Year and the Audio Book of the Year at the 2026 Australian Book Industry Awards; and Garth Nix, who so far has had more than seven million copies of his science fiction and fantasy books sold around the world.
Tickets to the author talks, panel discussions and workshops at the 2026 Dandenong Ranges Literary Festival are now on sale (and selling fast!) via: https://dandyrangeslitfest.net/. Highly recommended.
Note: This article was published under the title “Literary Festival is launched” by Ranges Trader Star Mail, September 1, 2026, P.24.
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 