Adelaide Festival 2018: Meet the new boss of Adelaide Writers’ Week

ADELAIDE this week was given a piercing insight into the character of the new director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, only they didn’t know it at the time.

Jo Dyer, the new Adelaide Writers” Week director at the Palais on the Riverbank. Picture: TAIT SCHMAAL

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ADELAIDE this week was given a piercing insight into the character of the new director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, only they didn’t know it at the time.

Jo Dyer, currently CEO of Sydney Writers’ Week, was on The Advertiser’s Festival Breakfast with Papers on the floating Palais on International Women’s Day, the day she was named the new chief of our beloved festival of fine writing.

She was an articulate and accomplished performer on a range of topics, from the representation of women in Parliament to medical marijuana and put forward a lively case for the economic benefits of legalising cannabis in South Australia.

“It could become the Amsterdam of Australia,” she said. A tourism bonanza. She’d even put the idea to Jay Weatherill, who’d laughed it off.

That she is a woman with a firm grasp on politics, social change and ideas was clear to everyone there. But what of her literary credentials?

The fiercely protective Writers’ Week audience will be watching and waiting when she takes over from Laura Kroetsch in June.

They can at least be reassured for now she has no plans to charge for the program in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden.

“I’ve always been a very big reader,” says Ms Dyer, whose previous experience has been as a producer in theatre, dance and film.

Motherhood had slowed the usually brisk pace of her reading – “I would just fall asleep two pages in” – but now her son is six she’d come “firing back”.

“I read a vast array of things, so deeply immersive fiction I love, but also nonfiction and ideas,” she adds.

Key programming decisions at Sydney Writers’ Festival, however, are made by artistic director Michaela McGuire.
“That’s the great opportunity for me here, to move into a purely creative role, and do the programming and be the final arbiter of the invitations and the themes,” she says.

Ms Dyer, 47, was raised and educated in Adelaide and retains strong family ties here, but will commute monthly from her home in Sydney, although that may change.

“That’s a bit up in the air,” she said. “I won’t move here immediately.”

Her partner, Tom Wright – who also happens to be the host of Breakfast with Papers – works at Belvoir Theatre and her son has just started school.

Still, the role represents a homecoming. Ms Dyer grew up in Glenunga, is a University of Adelaide law school graduate and began her 25-year career in the arts at the State Theatre Company in 1992.

It was there she met Festival artistic director Rachel Healy, who was then running the STC’s Magpie Theatre.

“I also worked at the Adelaide Fringe and the Star Club at the Lion Arts Centre,” recalls Ms Dyer.

“Heather Croall (current Fringe director) worked with me behind the bar, so we had this great time.”

Having moved to Sydney, she returned to run the Come Out festival in 2001, and had a “brief flirtation with politics” when she unsuccessfully sought preselection as the ALP candidate for Adelaide in the same year.

While she has firmly ruled out charging for the main Writers’ Week program in the gardens, Ms Dyer is keen to explore ways to extend and enhance the program.

“I want to build on Laura’s legacy,” she says.

“Certainly those wonderful six days under the trees in the gardens, you wouldn’t want to do anything to undermine that, but it is a somewhat homogenous demographic there,” she says. She was keen to explore after-work sessions, perhaps at the Palais, and different formats.

“It wouldn’t so much be about bottom line,” she says of any plans to charge for such sessions, as in Sydney, which is a stand-alone event.

“It’s a very different model here in Adelaide, you don’t need those huge commercial levers because you’ve got the security of the infrastructure of the Adelaide Festival, so there’s no need to try and generate huge sums of money in that way.”