Tackling the bigger issues: writers’ festival for lovers of football

When it comes to writers’ festivals, Australia surely has something for everyone. Literary Listings has 112 festivals on its 2023 calendar celebrating poetry, short stories, children’s books, young and emerging writers, crime, history, science fiction and fantasy, queer writers, women writers, Jewish writers and Shakespeare.

Well, something for almost everyone. What’s been missing out so far is sports writing. Which is odd when you consider that we’re a land of sports lovers and many of our books reflect that passion.

Setting out to fill the gap in at least one area is the Football Writers Festival. Now in its fourth year, it kicks off in Sydney on July 15, just before the opening match of the 2023 Women’s World Cup. For a small festival it has a big guest list. Over three days, 60 speakers will celebrate the game and debate its burning issues, including match-fixing and corruption in the selection of World Cup venues.

The guests include players and former players, coaches, journalists, historians and other experts. About 20 are authors of current books and they come from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, England, Germany, Ireland and Kenya. About 40 guests have written football books in the past.

The festival’s founder is Bonita Mersiades, a writer, sports administrator and lifelong passionate football fan. “Sport is an important part of our culture, it reflects society, and there’s a growing genre of nonfiction and fiction,” she says. “This is an opportunity to showcase some of the authors.” And also to examine the dark side of football: “We look at the big issues outside of groin strains and hamstrings.“

You can get World Cup tips from the experts, catch up on the history of the Socceroos and the Matildas and take your kids to sessions on sports journalist Stuart Thomas’s book When Mum and Dad See Me Kick; or Texi Smith’s Jarrod Black football novels.

As is fitting before the Women’s World Cup, there’s a strong focus on women players and writers about football. Guests include sport industry executive Sally Freedman, author of the provocatively titled Get Your Tits Out for the Lads, a memoir that shares her experiences of working in the male-dominated world of football clubs.

Other stories will come from top Irish player Clare Shine, who details battles with her personal demons in her memoir, Scoring Goals in the Dark; and Canadian champion Ciara McCormack, who has acted as a whistleblower in cases of coaches’ abuse of women players.

Award-winning Australian author Ellen van Neerven, who played football from a young age, will speak about their first non-fiction book, Personal Score, which looks at sport’s troubled relationship with race, gender and sexuality.

Mersiades is particularly proud of Hear Us Roar, an anthology of women’s football writing that came out of the festival’s competition to encourage young women from all over the world to write about football, especially in countries that haven’t seen football as women’s territory. “I’ve always felt very strongly there were not enough women engaged in writing about football or willing to put themselves forward to write,” she says.

Out of hundreds of entries, 17 were chosen for the anthology, and four of the writers are coming to Australia for the festival. Proceeds from sales of Hear Us Roar will go to the festivals’ charity partners: Literacy for Life Foundation, training Indigenous people to bring literacy to their communities; and Future4Nepal, a pet project of German soccer great Thomas Hitzlsperger, who is such a fan of the festival that he’s planning to come every year.

How many Australian writers’ festivals can inspire that kind of loyalty?

Janesullivan.sullivan9@gmail.com

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