Meet the guest curator for this year’s Writers Fest

AWARD winning author and historian professor Clare Wright has been given the job of helping curate this year’s Bendigo Writers Festival.

The 2014 Stella Award winner and Medal of the Order of Australia awardee was invited by festival founder Rosemary Sorenson as the professor of public engagement for La Trobe University.

Professor Wright said it was great being able to help with the line-up for this year’s festival.

“I have had an enormous amount of fun putting together 17 panels under the La Trobe presents banner,” she said.

“It has been a wonderful way for me to bring together a whole lot of circles in my world.

“This is like my sweet spot Venn diagram of academia, the literary world and cultural policy.”

Professor Wright said she is excited for audiences to experience the panels she has put together, and how they differ from other festivals.

“They’ve been curated in a quite broad intellectual sense,” she said.

“There are some really interesting combinations of ideas to go a bit deeper than perhaps some other writer’s festivals get to go.

“This won’t necessarily be about the sales of the books. It’s about being able to expose people to an extraordinary range of thinkers, writers, speakers and creative talent.”

Professor Wright has been a guest and chair at Bendigo Writers Festivals in the past and she said she loves the event and its unique set up in town.

“The best writer’s festivals are the ones that have multiple events, but they have them all in the one zone,” she said.

“Writer’s love communicating with audiences, but here they end up meeting the fans in the cafes and it’s amazing and it will all be happening on View Street.”

Set for Thursday, 4 to Sunday, 7 May, the full line up and ticket sales for this year’s Bendigo Writers Festival go on sale from 10am on Wednesday, 8 March.

Already revealed for this year’s event are local superstar authors Helen Garner, Thomas Kenneally and Victor Kelleher.

They’ll be joined via video by the UK’s Nick Hornby, author of works like High Fidelity, About a Boy and Fever Pitch, all of which went on to be made into feature films.