27.May.2009 My (Not-So) Quick Summary of 2009 Sydney Writers’ Festival (Part 2)
Continuing Part 1 of My Quick Summary of 2009 Sydney Writers’ Festival. Still on Saturday…
Conflict and Childhood (13:30-14:30)
We started queueing up for the event, meanwhile listening to The Stuff of the Past (another event who got broadcasted outside the room where it was held at). It talked about Amanda Curtin‘s The Sinkings, which deals wih the 19th-century murder of an ex-convict who lived his life as a man, but might have been a woman. Doesn’t that sound interesting? We got herd into our own event room before I could listen much further though.
For Conflict and Childhood we had Tash Aw and Abbas El-Zein. Abbas is from Beirut, Lebanon, and has lived in war environment as a child. He just recently published a memoir (Leave to Remain). Tash is a Malaysian who recently published his second book, Map of the Invisible World. It’s a story about two brothers who got separated as orphans, one lives in Malaysia having a nice life and one Indonesia having a more difficult life. He said it sort of reflects the journey of the two countries to independence. Malaysia had a smooth way to independence, while Indonesia was brutal. Having born in Indonesia, surely this book intrigued me. I’m putting it on my mental TBR pile.
Both men have since lived outside of their birth countries and found the distance actually make it easier to write about them. Both have English as their second (or even third) language. These are things that I can definitely relate to. The fascination of a second language and the obsession to master it. The experience as an “expatriate” (though that’s not exactly the right term anymore these days since that implies no heavy attachment to the country you live in). I found both men extremely humble and sympathetic.
I went to their book signing afterward and had my copy of The Harmony Silk Factory signed by Tash Aw. Yay! I got to take a picture with him too. His book is the only book I own of the visiting authors at this Festival and his signature is my very first author signature that I got ever. That’s something, eh!
With Tash Aw.
Since we went to the book signing, we missed the next event I wanted to go to. We probably missed it nevertheless. You needed to queue up about 10-20 minutes before most free events started to get in. So again, I just listened to it outside while queueing up. It started to rain. We sat down holding our umbrellas. There’s this one guy sitting alone in the rain just in front of us. I wondered why.
It got kinda gloomy and melancholy with the rain.
We got to listen to News, Feature, Book: Journalism’s Big Narrative Dig for a while. It featured Paul McGeough, Chloe Hooper and David Marr. Someone was very funny, but I don’t know who. It wasn’t Chloe, because it’s one of the guys. I chuckled a lot for that short time.
Truth in Fiction and Non-fiction (4-5pm)
We got herd in about half hour before the even started and got stamped this time, because they probably just realized that the queuing system had a big flaw. There’s about 100m and cafe with big crowd between the beginning of the official queue and the event doors. What stopped people to just slip in when the doors opened? (I didn’t! I queued!)
This time we got into a big room with capacity around 400 people. About twice bigger than all the other rooms I’d been to. On the panel we had Hugh Mackay, Michael Meehan and Amanda Lohrey. They’re all local authors writing fiction.
The format is a bit different this time. Each took turn to go up the podium and talk (read notes that they had written). They talked about how they bring elements of non-fiction and use it to write fiction. How some facts are dead important to get right in your fiction, otherwise it’ll lose credibility for some readers.
I thought it was okay. Some parts were interesting, some not so much. Oh and everybody in the panel was old (older than all the previous panels I went to), so there was probably a bit of generation gap there. Maybe.
The Author’s Right to Speak (5:30pm-6:30pm)
We went across the street for this event. Tried to find some food or snack before that, but they were so overpriced and not appealing. Then I got cranky because I was hungry and we sat so far away from the stage where the panel was on. Hubby was trying to cheer me up and bought me meat pie, but I was still not in a good mood, so at the end I didn’t get much from this session. The first session that I paid for!
I was looking forward to it for Monica Ali. I think she came to the Festival because she was promoting her new book too, In The Kitchen. But they all were. I wonder if anybody would come if not for promoting their new book. Anyhoo, apart from her, there were Neil James, Richard Flanagan and David Williamson. They discussed about freedom of writing. Touched a bit about PEN organisation (Sydney PEN, an affiliate of International PEN), “an association of writers devoted to freedom of expression in Australia and in the world at large”.
Monica Ali mentioned about The Jewel of Medina (Wiki page here for the controversy), how it was cancelled by Random House shortly before the publication date (then it was taken over by Beaufort Books), because of the warnings to the controversial subject matter. The novel tells a fictionalized version of the life of Aisha, one of the wives of Islam prophet, Muhammad. Well no surprises there. Anything about Muhammad is considered super sacred by the Muslims, so he can’t be touched. From what I read of the reviews though, the book is nothing much of a fluffy romance novel that wasn’t very accurate historically. But that’s the problem with historical fiction. How much is made up and how much is real is hard to know, unless you do the extensive research yourself.
The quality of the book is not the point however. The problem is how certain books are banned and writers are condemned for their writing, some cast out, jailed or even murdered. That’s what they’re fighting for.
The post is getting long again, so I’m going to publish the last part tomorrow! Hopefully I can show some pictures. I like taking photos, but I hate to transfer pictures from my camera to computer.