Melbourne Writers Festival 2013

I have had such a blast at this year’s MWF. More so than any other year I felt like the program embraced emerging and young writers, had brilliant women on stage and made me think about things in a different way.

For Express Media I hosted the Write Across Victoria event, where we award our young writers from years 7, 8 and 9 for outstanding short fiction pieces they have submitted. It was brilliant and our Voiceworks editor Kat Muscat did a great job getting the audience of students interested in what the authors had to say during the Q&A section of the session. We also held our final 6x6x6 event with amazing young writers such as Xani Colac, Zora Sanders and Lucy Knisley. It was a pleasure to watch this one go off without a hitch and with so much appreciation from the audience.

I managed to make it along to quite a few sessions, including the keynote by Boris Johnson, storytelling by The Moth and a plethora of sessions with speakers who blew me away including Tao Lin, Margo Lanagan, Bob Brown, Junot Diaz, M.J. Hyland and former Express alumni Esther Anatolitis. My highlight, probably unsurprisingly, was Tavi Gevenson who merged all of my favourite things together as a young feminist who achieves amazing things and is also completely pragmatic about her own awesomeness. Plus she talked about Twin Peaks and The Virgin Suicides, so of course I was in heaven.

The Edinburgh World Writers Conference and Scottish Writers stream deserves its own post, so jam packed with ideas and information it was. Unfortunately I’m running low on energy right now, so I’ll just say how much I appreciated the last leg of the epic EWWC being held in our fellow City of Literature, and it made me even more determined to return to Scotland to learn more about their literary world.