A Miles Franklin winner walks into a Sri Lankan bar

Perth Writers Festival stands up for debate, while Melbourne tears itself apart.

Miles Franklin winner Shankari Chandran delights in telling naughty stories about Christos Tsiolkas.

Do you know the fastest way to improve a nation’s economy? Educate the girls. It’s as simple, and as complicated, as that. Educated girls grow up to be educated women, who can take their chances in life, same as men do.

To that end, it was a complete pleasure to attend a special presentation by the Miles Franklin Award winner, Shankari Chandran, at Colombo Social in Enmore in Sydney’s inner west last Tuesday. The event was a fundraiser for Room To Read’s work in Sri Lanka. The organisation has a strong focus on books, reading and education, especially for girls.

The mission statement says, in part: “Many world problems can be addressed through one solution: education. Why? ­Because knowing how to read makes people safer, healthier and more self-sufficient — yet more than 773 million people cannot read – and two-thirds of these individuals are women and girls.”

Also benefiting from the event: the good people at Palmera, an organisation providing support to Sri Lankan villagers during the worst economic crisis in decades. Donations go toward the absolute basics: nutritional packages for pregnant women; poultry for kitchen gardens; food stores for farmers in the rice districts, to tide them over between seasons.

Shankari is the most polished speaker I’ve come across in recent years. People are still talking about the speech she gave when she won the Miles Franklin. She is funny. She is warm. She has a point of view, and she’s not afraid to share it, in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you’ve been hit over the head with a wet mop. She told a great story about a recent exchange with Christos Tsiolkas. You must get her to tell it when you next see her at a writers’ festival. Besides being a lawyer, writer, raconteur and mother of four, Shankari is a handy cook, who has contributed two recipes to The Australian’s summer recipe books. I’ve tried one of her recipes – the omelette – and it was superb. That said, the food at Colombo Social was beyond fine. They absolutely laid it on, and why not? It was such a good cause.

Room to Read focuses on schools in historically low-income communities during the very early primary school years, and during the secondary school years, for girls’ education. Again: educated women are healthier, earn more income for their families, and are greater contributors to their community and country. You can start a fundraiser, or make a monthly donation. Details at www.roomtoread.org and palmera.org.

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Three cheers for the Perth Writers’ Festival, everyone! They’ve done the apparently impossible and given a platform to writers who disagree on the Middle East – and the place didn’t implode.

In fact, it seems like everyone felt good about it.

As some readers will know, the organisers of the Perth Writers Festival were under intense pressure to drop Deborah Conway from the program, after she used extremely clumsy language to describe the recruitment, by Hamas, of teenage boys, to fight the war against Israel. Conway has been accused of celebrating the slaughter of children, as if anyone would do that. As she said on her Instagram page: “Jew and Arab need to live side by side, it is the only way.”

Perth didn’t cave, meaning Conway – lead singer of Do Ri Me, and author of Book of Life – was allowed to take her place on the stage.

Meanwhile, the West Australian writer Tess Woods – her new book, The Venice Hotel, is out later this year – did a marvellous job of bringing the audience together, saying: “Please lobby our government for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Palestine, and to call for the release of every last remaining Israeli hostage.”

Woods told her followers she’d had “a raw but respectful conversation with Deborah who showed much grace and we listened to each other … Instead of trying to have people cancelled from now on, how about we have conversations instead? How else can we ever hope to have peace?”

It was the perfect antidote to the tearing apart of the community that is going on elsewhere, and Perth should be congratulated.

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The Melbourne Writers’ Festival is on its knees, down from a high of 300 events a decade ago to something like 50 this year, and things are going from bad to worse. The organisation’s chief executive and deputy chairman quit this week. Les Reti, who for 30 years served Melbourne women as a doctor at the Royal Women’s Hospital, told The Age he couldn’t stand by while the festival promoted “historically untrue and deeply offensive” material in its program. Fiona Menzies has also quit. The festival is scheduled to run in the second week of May. Is it going to be a far-Left spittle-fest, filled with hate? Please say it ain’t so, Melbourne, which not so long ago opened its arms to more survivors of the Holocaust than any other city on earth.

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Our family had to say farewell to our adored blue staffy, Bella, last week. She was almost 15 years old, and boy, had that fur soaked up some tears over the years. We had a wonderful morning at Bronte where she was able to steady herself on her feet long enough to get a sniff of the ocean breeze. Some tradies who recognised the journey she was on came to salute her with a couple of double-handed pats on her barrel belly, which she appreciated. She had a lamb chop for breakfast, and then staged a rather spectacular rally so she could have another for dinner. My son carried her onto the golden sands at Bondi in the evening for a glorious goodbye to the neighbourhood where she was extremely famous and much admired, having lived there since she was a puppy. She was such a good dog and we will miss her enormously. Which maybe explains why I am so pleased to publish Toby Fitch’s beautiful poem, Elegy to a Staffy, today. He’s also lost a pup. Dogs, hey? Just the best.

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Today’s pages: we have a fabulous interview with Rebecca Kuang, author of the spectacularly successful Yellowface; we have the Notable Books column, anchored this week by Samuel Bernard; we have a fine review of a biography of the man who, for better or worse, gifted Twitter to the world, and an extract from a book by a woman born into a goat-herding family in Afghanistan, who got herself an education, and a role in government. Enjoy.