By Jason Steger
The Feminist Writers Festival put in a sterling effort to hold a virtual festival in the midst of a year disrupted entirely by the pandemic. So it’s particularly sad – and sadly ironic at this particular time − that artistic director Nikki Anderson has announced the festival is shutting up shop. Since 2016 it has hosted 56 events mainly in the eastern and southern states, featuring more than 160 speakers, along with publishing a variety of essays and podcasts.
“So far it’s been done on sweat, tears and passion of a group of women,” says artistic director Nikki Anderson.Credit:
Anderson said it was bitter-sweet given the festival survived last year. Another issue was the fact that the work – a lot of it – was done on an unpaid, volunteer basis: “So far it’s been done on sweat, tears and passion of a group of women. We had hoped to hand things over to a new cohort.”
Last year was the only time the festival had received specific arts funding – from Creative Victoria. “We profited from their funding when others were not in a position to function.” And Anderson said that although it was called a festival, FWF also did other things such as publishing and podcasts. “It seems to me,” she said, “the intersection between arts and feminism is a tricky space to be navigating at the moment.”
In a statement, the festival organisers said: “With decreasing arts funding and, increasingly, the allocation of money going to fewer, larger organisations, we see little consideration of the important role that smaller organisations play in bringing diversity and richness to a cultural field. It is hard to watch this happening from inside a beleaguered industry, on all fronts, and we stand in solidarity with overworked arts orgs everywhere.”
MacLehose moves on
Welbeck Publishing is going to be the new home for the indefatigable Christopher MacLehose, who will this month launch a new literary imprint for the company founded by Mark Smith and Wayne Davies. They have previous form, having in 2004 founded Quercus together. MacLehose is calling the new imprint Mountain Leopard Press and is planning to “bring literary instinct and the craft of traditional publishing to new audiences”.
MacLehose has for the past 13 years been running the MacLehose Press imprint (for Quercus) but will open the doors of MLP later this month and concentrate mainly on translated literature – no surprise as that’s how he has made his substantial mark in publishing − along with “a very few outstanding authors writing in English from around the world”. No surprise also, that there’s a leopard involved in the MLP colophon – that’s the imprint’s logo on the spine − as it was for the Harvill Press when MacLehose ran it (he led a management buyout in 1995) and published books such as Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow and works by W.G. Sebald.
He left in 2004 after Harvill had been taken over by Random House and set up the aforementioned MacLehose Press imprint, which had huge success with Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc) and really put Quercus on the map. Smith was a champion of Peter Temple’s work in Britain and published The Broken Shore, which was the first Australian novel to win the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger.
History cashes in
While Australian writers of historical fiction are dominating the Walter Scott award in Britain, with novels by Pip Williams, Kate Grenville and Stephen Conte up for the £25,000 ($45,000) prize, here the ARA Historical Novel Prize, worth $50,000 in its inaugural year and awarded to Miranda Riwoe for Stone Sky Gold Mountain, has just increased its total prize money to $100,000 for this year. That will include $5000 to two shortlisted authors.
The prize is adding a $30,000 award for the winner in a children and young-adult category, with $5000 going to each of the authors. Last year the prize had more than 200 entries. Entries for this year’s prize open on April 14. hnsa.org.au