Sad About Missing Sydney’s Writers’ Festival This Year? Read Your Way Through It Instead

On Thursday, March 12 – the same day that the World Health Organisation declared the novel coronavirus a global pandemic – we launched the 2020 Sydney Writers’ Festival program. This year’s program had an appropriately apocalyptic theme, “Almost Midnight”. The hand on the doomsday clock moved more quickly than we ever could have anticipated. Just four days later, following public health advice and bans on public gatherings, we made the inevitable but nonetheless devastating decision to cancel the Festival.

On an alternate timeline, during the last week of April a huge festival audience would be joining more than 400 of the world’s most exhilarating, honest, clever, ambitious, joyful and disquieting writers and thinkers as they took part in 346 events.

The cancellation of this year’s program has had a significant impact not just on the future of Sydney Writers’ Festival but on the larger literary community, and especially on writers whose work was to be featured for the first time in this program. We’re doing all that we can over the coming months to highlight the incredible work of these writers, and I’ve put together an isolation reading list of some of the books I’m most excited about. Ask your local independent bookseller if they have these in stock – many are offering free delivery, and our bookstores need your help too.

The Adversary, Ronnie Scott
I’m calling it early: this wildly funny, clever and tender novel is the Australian literary debut of the year. Set over one sticky Melbourne summer, a group of young men explore their friendship, sexuality and alliances on the bleachers of Fitzroy pool as they step falteringly, hilariously, and tremendously sweetly a little closer towards adulthood. The Adversary has drawn wide praise from a host of SWF alumni, including Christos Tsiolkas, who called it “terrific, sad, and elegant and funny and also bloody moving”, and Bryan Washington, who describes it as “sexy, bittersweet and capacious … an instant classic”. I’m going to go a bit further, and say that this is our generation’s Monkey Grip.
penguin.com.au

Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener
Uncanny Valley is former tech-worker Anna Wiener’s grippingly prescient 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; American writer Rebecca Solnit describes the book as “like Joan Didion at a startup”. This debut is at once a cutting and shrewd 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. Jia Tolentino, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Trick Mirror, says it’s “[a] definitive document of a world in transition: I won’t be alone in returning to it for clarity and consolation for many years to come.”
harpercollins.com.au

Throat, Ellen van Neerven

Throat is the explosive sophomore poetry collection from acclaimed Mununjali-Yugambeh (south-east Queensland) writer Ellen van Neerven. Exploring love, language and land, Throat is an irreverent and powerful anthology which casts a light on our country’s unreconciled past and precarious present. Ellen’s won a host of prestigious awards, including the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers’ Prize, and has been described by Maxine Beneba Clarke (author of The Hate Race) as a young writer who “best represents all that Australian literature was, is, and will surely be, in the decades to come”.
uqp.com.au

Fathoms, Rebecca Giggs
When Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beach, she considered how whales could shed light on the condition of our seas, and what they might be able to reveal about us. Her spectacular 2015 Granta essay Whale Fall was the beginning of what would eventually become Rebecca’s first book, Fathoms: The world in the whale. Rebecca writes vividly about the natural world with the spirit of Rebecca Solnit and marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, and has been endorsed by Australian writer Maria Tumarkin, who says, “I can’t think of many books in which love for the world and uncompromising, ever-deepening rigour come together in this way. Time slows down. This book makes a permanent dent in the reader.” Fathoms is published on May 1, and you can (and should) pre-order a copy now.

scribepublications.com.au

Nothing to See Here, Kevin Wilson

This paradoxically light, melancholy, tender and bitingly funny novel is one of my standout reads of the last year. The immensely satisfying and wholly original narrator is Lillian; a chronically apathetic, lazy and impatient young woman, who could charitably be described as a loser. When she receives an offer from her old boarding school friend Madison to move into her mansion and care for her twin step kids, Lillian figures she might as well. This offer seems too good to be true because it is: the twins spontaneously burst into flames whenever they get agitated, and it’s up to Lillian to figure out how to help them. This oddball novel has a huge heart, and has stayed with me for a long time.
textpublishing.com.au