Brisbane Writers Festival 2023: A Conversation with Artistic Director Jackie Ryan
By Kate Love
The Brisbane Writers Festival (BWF) has been a platform for showcasing the works of talented writers, poets and storytellers from around the world for over 50 years. This year, the festival returns with an exciting program that promises to engage, inspire and challenge audiences.
In 2023, Brisbane Writers Festival is spinning a rollicking tale of festive entertainment across five days, four nights and more than 100 events. From blockbuster bestsellers to literary luminaries and everything in between, BWF 2023 is an unmissable adventure from beginning to end.
To learn more about what to expect from the 2023 BWF, I spoke with the festival's Artistic Director, Jackie Ryan. In this interview, Jackie shares her insights into the festival's theme, the featured guests, and the events that will take place during the festival. Join us as we dive into the world of literature and storytelling with one of the festival's key figures.
What inspired you to curate your inaugural 2023 program for the Brisbane Writers Festival?
A lot of people have had a pretty grim last few years. There’s been floods, fire and plague. So we wanted to encourage people to get out of the house. The vibe we're going for is putting the ‘festive’ in festival. This is going to mean different things to different people. For some it means getting into the political nitty gritty, while for others it means romance or First Nations voices or talking about spies, the environment or comedy.
We tried to have something that would appeal to everyone. We want to get people out of the house because something amazing happens in the middle of a festival. You suddenly look around and you've got a precinct full of people who love words all here to see people who wield words very well.
You have over 150 live events. Can you tell us about a particular event or author that you are especially excited about featuring in this year's festival?
I'm supposed to love all my children equally. But it's very unusual to get Tim Winton at a writers festival. He doesn't do many of those, and it’s sold out. And, of course, to get the current Booker Prize winner in the year that they’re the reigning champ, that's unusual too. I'm pretty pleased to be able to have Shehan Karunatilaka [The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida].
The eminent Australian writer Alexis Wright is doing a keynote speech for us. That's pretty extraordinary. We've also got a few cultural curators that have put together some programs I'm pretty excited about.
Our Country of Focus this year is South Korea and there's a lot of really interesting talents coming through there. The best known of those names would be Bora Chung, who wrote Cursed Bunny, which is just a wild ride. I hope people come out and see those as well.
We have two First Nations curators, one looking after Aboriginal writing and the other looking after Torres Strait Islander writing, and they've put together, even within those small curatoriums, such a diverse range of panels. We've got everything from the Olympic experience through to translating Shakespeare into First Nations languages.
In your opinion, what role does literature play in shaping our culture and society, and especially in relation to brisbane?
At the Brisbane Writers Festival we think of ourselves as a regional festival. We're very engaged with national and Australian literature, but we also have a mind to growing and providing a platform for our local talent as well. We've got a very strong literary community here and Brisbane Writers Festival has a strong record of promoting those voices.
Another of our cultural curators is Matthew Condon, who is looking after the sessions called Brisbane Stories, but of course we've got lots of other Brisbane writers at play as well. Writers help shape the ideas of a city, right? Would New York be New York if people weren't writing about it, singing about it, putting it in movies. And more broadly, I think it's in tandem with other arts that help create a feeling of a city and tell the story of a city.
So in tandem with some of those other arts - song and music and television. But, of course, a lot of television and movies are based off books anyway. I think collectively we help tell the stories of what cities are or what they can be.
A focus for this year's festival is ‘plot twists and page-turners’. How did you approach selecting authors and events that fit within this theme?
That fits under something for everyone. We've got the main catchphrase: ‘Have we got a story for you!’
It’s a thriving industry, crime and its different subcategories, such as thriller or true crime. We have so many of them. You can plot your way through a day and see mostly those, so I called it Crime Wave because there's so many different sessions you can see with books that cover those, but it's not the festival theme.
We’ve done a lot on romance and sports and other things as well. And there were a lot of books out this year, and a lot that I thought would have audience appeal.
Can you share any behind-the-scenes stories or challenges you faced while putting together this year's festival?
The challenges are funding and time. I’d want to program many more writers if we had more venues and enough audience to keep going. I wouldn’t stop there. So really it’s just resources. There is so much that has to happen for a festival to run. It’s all a big long paper trail.
The Brisbane Writers Festival has been running for over 60 years. What do you think has made it such a long-standing and successful event?
It’s the longest continuously running writers festival in Australia. What makes arts festivals like ours successful is the turnover with different visions every few years with different curators who are hopefully responding to the needs and interests of the day, and then bringing some of their own things along that they think people would be interested to find out: come for this, stay for this.
It keeps changing up and keeps being fresh and we keep hopefully having access to authors that people want to come out and see. We’ve got Grace Tame this year and her session is sold out and Meg Bignell only has a handful of tickets left. I love whacking up a sold out session sign!
What are some of the blockbuster bestsellers being written in Brisbane and beyond?
I’ll direct you to Queensland Crime for that one. As part of the Crime Wave panel, we've got an author called Frank Chalmers, whose first book is out. It's debut crime fiction called Conviction, and Judy Powell, who has done a whole trilogy based in Brisbane called the Brisbane Line trilogy. And she's been very good friends with Matthew Condon, who is the king of Brisbane true crime.
He’d probably be our biggest Brisbane true crime writing name, among his other accomplishments, and he's doing a number of things. He’s even doing a talk on the 50th anniversary of Whiskey Au Go Go, because he’s done a lot of investigations into Brisbane’s seedy underbelly and that’s one of them.
He's also doing a special panel on the DNA Disaster with Hedley Thomas [DNA Disaster: The Judge and the Journalist] about another crime that got botched. So those are probably the bigger crime stories that we've got by Brisbane authors at the festival this time around; some true crime, some fiction.
It’s the ability to put it into a story because the investigators can only get things so far. When you've got people that can do that and tell a compelling story, then the public gets interested and wants to know what happens, which may inspire police to reopen those investigations as well.
With the rise of digital media and e-books, what are your thoughts on the traditional book and the different ways people access literature today?
It doesn't doesn't really worry me what format. I just love that people are still reading and supporting authors. I do think in terms of festivals people are coming for the in-person experience like a concert, but also they want that book signed. You can't sign your iPad. E-books don't make for great mementos, you know.
A lot of us just love analog. I do. For a lot of us that's just a preferred format for reading. I remember things better when I read them. If I listen to an audio book, I don't remember much about it shortly afterwards. I think there's a difference in the way the experience lingers. But I suppose it may also be a habit.
I think of sitting down with a book as ‘me time’ and it almost feels decadent. You're concentrating and involved in the story. Whereas watching TV, I think can be a more passive experience, seeing a book or stories told that way, or even if you're listening to it, you can have the audiobook on while you're driving or washing up, you're surrendering more of your attention to it.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to break into the publishing industry?
We support aspiring writers at the festival through our workshops. We’ve got Madelaine Lucas coming over from America and her workshop [Writing Dynamic Relationships] is sold out, but there’s half a dozen others exploring different types of techniques and different types of writing. So that'll be one way. And just come along to the sessions and hear people talk about their craft and why they're doing what they do.
That's what the Writers Festival can do for people in terms of listening and learning, whereas the writers centres is where you go to get trained and find out about how to pursue publishers. We used to run a couple of events like that where people could meet publishers and industry people, we may again, but we haven’t got it on this year.
In your experience, what sets the Brisbane Writers Festival apart from other literary events around the world?
We have a nice local supportive community. We've got a lot of very generous people ready to give their time to moderate and be chairs.
I don't know that I necessarily would want to go into competition with any other writers festivals, saying why we're better. I just want to all get along! We do partner with a number of the festivals to help with artist shares, to bring artists out, so that each writers festival in each state can provide a wider range of overseas guests for our independent audiences. We do work together a bit too.
What can attendees expect from this year's festival, and how do you hope it will impact the literary community in Brisbane and beyond?
I think they can expect a good time. Someone asked me if I could get one message out, what would it be? And I answered to open up the program, take a look. There might be more in there than you're expecting. It's not going to be like going to school. Come and see the things that you're interested in because you're interested in it and because these people are really good at writing about it and they're good at talking about it.
What are your favourite titles of 2023 so far and which books are sitting on your bedside table right now?
One of the cool things about the festival is to read books that you might not have otherwise come across. Shelley Parker-Chan’s book She Who Became the Sun, that was pitched and spoken very highly of. It’s such an extraordinary, confident and well-rounded debut novel. It was so good. That was one of the nice surprises.
I’m not programming for me. I'm not reading just for me. I'm reading books to see if they might appeal to other people. I'm reading genres that I wouldn't normally look into. There's been some pleasant surprises. Clinton Fernandes’ book Subimperial Power: Australia in the International Arena. It sounded a bit dry and heady and academic originally, but I thought this will have good literature in this, and it turns out that was another nice surprise book.
And finally what would you like people to take away from this year’s 2023 festival?
I hope that the authors that they came for gave everything they wanted. But I also hope they find new people to follow, new favourite books. It can be perusing the bookshop and thinking, oh that looks interesting, I wonder when that person’s on.
And sometimes you go to a panel to see one person and you discover another person that sounds amazing and you go and buy their book. So those are the things I'd like to see happening.
Jackie Ryan: "A real page turner"
Roll up, roll up – there’s a new AD in town!
Acclaimed writer and programmer Jackie Ryan has stepped into the role of Artistic Director at Brisbane Writers Festival.
With her extensive arts experience and strong sector networks, Jackie’s ready to deliver a cracking line-up of literary events that’ll spark big ideas and bold conversations.
“Have we got a story for you: it's got spies, romance, politics, science, history, poetry, crime, technology, monsters, performance, war, food and comedy. Look out, Brisbane – BWF 2023 is going to be a real page turner."
Jackie has held literary and cultural programming roles at State Library of Queensland, Queensland Writers Centre and Avid Reader. She also knows a thing or two about Brisbane: her 2018 book We’ll Show the World: Expo 88 (UQP), the story of the river city’s most beloved cultural event, won the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance and the University of Southern Queensland History Book Award.