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Nobel laureates, Pulitzer winners lead Sydney Writers’ Festival line up
By Helen Pitt
Three Booker Prize winners, three Miles Franklin winners, two Nobel laureates, a Carnegie medallist and a Pulitzer Prize winner are among the star-studded line-up of authors taking part in this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival, which launched its program on Thursday night.
Popular US-based writer and bookshop owner Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and most recently Tom Lake, will give the festival’s opening night address on May 20, in conversation with ABC journalist Annabel Crabb on the festival theme “take me away”. Indigenous guest curator Jazz Money will perform a poetry reading at the opening night of the festival, which runs until May 26.
Authors Ann Patchett, Bonnie Garmus and Paul Lynch will appear at the 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival.Credit: Getty Images/ Emily Dorio
Bonnie Garmus, the London-based US author of Lessons in Chemistry, a book about science, sexism and subverting the status quo and now a popular Apple TV series, Los Angeles-based crime writing superstar Michael Connelly and best-selling American author of Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng, are among the 35 international writers attending the week-long festival.
Irish authors Paul Lynch, current Booker Prize winner for his fifth novel, Prophet Song, and fellow 2023 Booker short-listed Paul Murray for The Bee Sting, will also star, while their compatriot Sebastian Barry, author of last year’s Booker long-listed Old God’s Time, will appear via video link from Ireland.
Paul Lynch, winner of the 2023 Booker Prize.Credit: AP
Other notables include Tanzanian-born 2021 Nobel literary laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah (After Lives), 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction winner for The Sympathiser, Viet Thahn Nguyen, whose new book is a memoir (A Man of Two Faces), and French/Moroccan author and diplomat Leila Slimani, the first Moroccan woman to be awarded France’s prestigious Goncourt Prize in 2016.
Nobel Prize-winning scientist and author of A Crack In Creation: The New Power To Control Evolution, Jennifer Doudna, also the subject of the biography The Code Breaker by former Time magazine editor Walter Isaacson, will appear at an event called “The Gene Editing Revolution” at the Sydney Opera House on May 21.
Australian US-based author Kate Manne, considered the philosopher of the #MeToo movement, will deliver the closing night address at Carriageworks entitled “On the future of Misogyny”.
Other international names of note include Dominican/American Elizabeth Acevedo, the first woman of colour to win Britain’s Carnegie medal for children’s literature, and Booker Prize-winning translator Jennifer Croft, who in The Extinction of Irena Ray has written her own novel about translators searching for a missing author.
Sydney Writers’ Festival artistic director Ann Mossop at Carriageworks.Credit: Rhett Wyman
At the 2024 program launch at Carriageworks on Thursday night, Sydney Writers’ Festival artistic director Ann Mossop said her second festival heralded the return of international guests.
“This is the biggest international line-up and program since COVID, and we have tried to include a little bit for everyone who loves words from fiction, non-fiction, poetry, journalism and writing for the theatre,” she said.
“We have everything from a clutch of amazing Olympians (Chloe Dalton, Jana Pittman and Anna Meares) having a conversation about sport with journalist Tracey Holmes, as well as discussions about politics, philosophy, food and even the Tokyo Underworld.”
Australian headliners include three Miles Franklin winners, Shankari Chandran (Safe Haven) Melissa Lucashenko (Edenglassie), Anna Funder (Wifedom), Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan (Question 7) and actor Bryan Brown (The Drowning) interviewed by his friend and fellow actor/author Sam Neill.
Talks on new works by local writers Trent Dalton (Lola In The Mirror), Julia Baird (Bright Shining) and Holly Ringland (The House That Joy Built) will feature in the program.
Events will take place at Carriageworks, Town Hall, City Recital Hall, The State Library, Parramatta’s Riverside Theatre and a host of other venues across the city.