Jacinda Ardern and Booker Prize winner lead Melbourne Writers Festival line-up

Booker Prize winner David Szalay, author of Flesh, former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, and Rebecca Kuang, best known for Yellowface, will headline this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival.

Also on the line-up are locals Stella Prize winner Evelyn Araluen, award-winning author Tony Birch and activist and advocate Grace Tame.

This year marks the festival’s 40th anniversary and has the theme ‘Visions and Revisions’. “I hope that this year’s program has a sense of fluidity and playfulness and curiosity across it that reflects that evolution,” says festival director Veronica Sullivan.

Despite the public implosions of Adelaide Writers’ Week in January and Bendigo Writers Festival last year, Sullivan says the appetite for literary events is massive. “Readers and audiences have a renewed awareness of the importance of writers festivals; you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone,” she says.

Thus far, she has not been pressured to invite or uninvite anyone. “There’s a very clear remit that it’s a festival director who is responsible for curation in that regard,” she said ahead of the program launch.

To Sullivan’s mind, Melbourne Writers Festival plays a dual role, as both an antidote and an interrogation. It can transport people away from reality for a day or an evening through the discussion of ideas, writing and fiction. “But our role is also to reflect and interrogate and have the realities of the world discussed at the festival,” she says.

Canadian-Ukrainian writer Maria Reva, Palestinian academic-turned-memoirist Tareq Baconi, as well as locals Amy Remeikis, Omar Musa, Antoinette Lattouf and Don Watson are part of the streams that explore the state of the world.

From further afield are Flashlight author and Booker nominee Susan Choi, UK-based poet Nikita Gill, and Yann Martel, author of The Life of Pi.

Highlights for Sullivan this year include the premiere of song cycle performances Life Lines by vocalist and composer Sophia Brous and pianist and composer Paul Grabowsky, inspired by the work of poet Dorothy Porter. Events like this are an opportunity to invite new audiences, who may not be accustomed to coming to a writers’ festival, she says.

For Sullivan, the event provides something you won’t find anywhere else. At its heart, she also wants playfulness, an example of which is the free event devoted to the cryptic crossword.

Another is Human Love Quest, a live dating game show which readers of a certain age will recognise as similar to the 1980s TV show Perfect Match. Three hopefuls looking for love will compete for someone’s attention in a competition open to all genders and sexual orientations, says Sullivan.

There’s also a riff on the much-missed ABC TV program First Tuesday Bookclub, which sees Marieke Hardy and Jason Steger back together, joined by Monthly editor Michael Williams in conversation with Yann Martel.

Melbourne Writers Festival has taken many shapes over the years and Sullivan says it is not a static thing. She always thinks very carefully about who is invited, and those considerations are always driven by what audiences want to hear.

Melbourne Writers Festival runs from May 7 to 10. The Age is a festival partner. The full program will be published in The Saturday Age on March 21.

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