Telling Time

A conversation with friends a year later

At last year's Midsumma Festival, we brought together five authors from diverse areas of writing and outlooks. They were told a couple of days before the event that there would be no host. Left to their own devices Dennis Altman, Neal Drinnan, Quinn Eades, Andrea Goldsmith and Luke Williams gave us an incredibly satisfying night of literary conversation, knowledge sharing and candid observation about their lives, work and writing. It was balanced, authentic and revealed things that sometimes get lost in a writers festival interview in the attempt to cover all the marketing requirements, ego rubbing and public perceptions associated with the authors and books in an hour.

The conversation was at turns a mini workshop on novel writing, a joint effort to collapse the artificial walls between genres, a timely reminder of the fallibility of memory and historical context, and a celebration of all types of authorship as primarily acts of the imagination. They gather unbound again, this time with powerful subject matter at hand: reflections on the past year. How did the past 14 months shape them as writers? Are they the same people? Are books as relevant as they once were to them? What will they do with the year's gift of fantastical material? We expect some powerful and moving commentary from this informed and engaged group of authors. This event is live streamed simultaneous with additional features only available on the streamed event.