Brisbane Writers Festival to celebrate 50 years
The Brisbane Writers Festival will celebrate 50 years next year
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- Old fashioned writing still very much a part of Queensland arts and culture.
The Brisbane Writers Festival will celebrate a fantastic milestone next year in Queensland with its 50 year celebration program. Discussion within literary circles for suggestions on how best to celebrate next year’s September 2012 program have already begun.
According to festival director Jane O Hara this year’s program was a fantastic success. The program ran from September 7 to 13, with a multitude of sessions and activities available for festival attendees over a five day program of writing and reading.
Local author Nick Earls was part of the Saturday program session titled, Movies: Ruining Books for Years. Other participants in the panel discussion session were Zenon Kohler from local film company Wickham Park Production, and the author of Romulus, My Father, Raimond Gaita, and United Kingdom writer, Neil Cross.
An in depth article about the session can be read here.
Nick Earls is the author of 13 books. Two have been made into feature films and five have been recreated as plays. Prior to his panel discussion, Nick Earl’s blogged his mixed feelings towards film adaptations:
“So, why do I get sucked back in? Because some films are American Beauty, or Lantana, or hilarious, or genuinely moving. And because sometimes there’s a team involved who have great ideas and they ask me nicely and I look at where they are, like the look of it and work out that, years after the novel, these characters are fresh to me again, and I’m already getting a rush of new dialogue to the brain and finding things I want to do with them,” Mr Earls wrote.
He recently published novel The Fix has been a hit within literary circles. Fiction editor at the Australian Book Review, Chris Flynn praised Mr Earls for a well written Australian novel in recent book review.
“The tone is one of quiet confidence, of a writer who is enjoying his work: contemporary, cliché-free Australian fiction that is sure to have a very wide appeal. An important work, then, for Earls, a writer hitting his straps with gusto,” Mr Flynn wrote.
Nick Earls has cemented his place as a contemporary Australian author with a career of longevity that many aspiring and existing Australian authors admire, and aspire to emulate.