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Winter in the West with Writers on the Road | 2022 Byron Writers Festival
August 21, 2022 @ 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Free
Byron Writers Festival is taking its regional touring program Writers on the Road out west this winter, to Dorrigo, Armidale, Glen Innes, Tenterfield and Grafton. Gather around the literary fire with acclaimed authors Jane Caro, Nigel Featherstone, Mirandi Riwoe and Australian Poetry Slam Champion Huda Fadlelmawla. They hit the road in the week leading up to the annual Byron Writers Festival.
It may be cold outside, but we are burning up with a passion for storytelling and poetry, all tall tales and true.
“Sharing our stories has held the northern NSW community together through some pretty tough times over the past two years,” said Zoe Pollock, Artistic Director at Byron Writers Festival, “Writers on the Road is a wonderful opportunity for readers in western towns to meet and hear from authors appearing at the Byron Writers Festival. The program offers people in the regions a taste of the festival experience. This year there is something for everyone including lovers of fiction, poetry and big ideas.”
Writers on the Road events are free and open to the public, thanks to Byron Writers Festival and Create NSW, and bookings are essential.
THE STORYTELLERS
Jane Caro AM is a Walkley Award-winning Australian columnist, author, novelist, broadcaster, advertising writer, documentary maker, feminist and social commentator.
Jane appears frequently on Q&A, The Drum and Sunrise. She has created and presented five documentary series for ABC’s Compass, airing in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. She and Catherine Fox present a popular podcast with Podcast One, Austereo ‘Women With Clout’. She writes regular columns in Sunday Life.
Jane has published twelve books, including Just a Girl, Just a Queen and Just Flesh & Blood, a young adult trilogy about the life of Elizabeth Tudor, and the memoir Plain Speaking Jane. She created and edited Unbreakable which featured stories women writers had never told before and was published just before the Harvey Weinstein revelations. Her most recent non-fiction work is Accidental Feminists, about the fate of women over 50. The Mother is her first novel for adults.
Huda the Goddess is the current Australian Poetry Slam Champion and two-time Queensland champ. Huda is a spoken word poet, educator, mental health advocate, dancer and workshop facilitator. She describes poetry as one of her senses that allows her to turn her experiences into art; she is currently working on her first poetry collection. As a proud African-Muslim woman it is important to her that young women from her community are represented and their stories are shared. Poetry is her connection to communities, land and her people. Having the chance to make people feel something will always be her goal as an artist.
Huda is currently working on her first book, ‘The Birth of Goddess’ a poetry collection inspired by her lived experience. It talks about relationships, family, self-discovery, mental health and social issues
that have affected her life. Being a black, Muslim, woman, and immigrant – it’s all in the book.
Mirandi Riwoe is the author of The Burnished Sun, a collection of short stories and novellas. Her novel Stone Sky Gold Mountain won the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction and the ARA Historical Novel Prize and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Her novella The Fish Girl won Seizure’s Viva la Novella and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Mirandi has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Studies (QUT).
Nigel Featherstone is an Australian writer who has been published widely. His war novel, Bodies of Men, was published by Hachette Australia in 2019. It was longlisted for the 2020 ARA Historical Novel Prize, shortlisted in the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards, and shortlisted for the 2020 ACT Book of the Year. Nigel’s new novel, My Heart is a Little Wild Thing, is published by Ultimo Press (Hardie Grant). His short stories have appeared in the Review of Australian Fiction, Meanjin, and Overland among many other journals, and his creative nonfiction has been published by The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, Canberra Times, and the Chicago Quarterly Review, among other outlets. He wrote the libretto for The Weight of Light, as commissioned by the Hume Conservatorium, with the music composed by James Humberstone of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music; this work was developed by The Street Theatre in Canberra and had its world premiere in 2018. Nigel is currently working on a play with spoken-word songs, which is being developed by The Street Theatre and has been supported by Create NSW. Nigel lives on unceded Ngunnawal / Ngambri / Gundangara Country (otherwise known as the NSW Southern Tablelands).
To contact Writers on the Road, email: roadtrip@byronwritersfestival or call Zacharey Jane on 0432 922 381
