Authors flock to festival
BRITISH author Howard Jacobson, who won last year’s £50,000 ($A76,500) Man Booker Prize for fiction with The Finkler Question, will be one of the international guests at the Sydney Writers’ Festival which opens next week.
Jacobson, 68, has lived in Australia over the years, including a stint as a lecturer at the University of Sydney.
The winner of this year’s Man Booker International Prize will be announced during the week-long 2011 Sydney Writers’ Festival.
Among the 13 authors who have been nominated for the £60,000 (A$92,000) prize are two Jewish writers – Sydney-based David Malouf and American Philip Roth.
Melbourne author and journalist Mark Dapin will be a guest at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
His Strange Country was a travel bestseller and his first novel, King of the Cross, won a Ned Kelly Award. Dapin’s new novel, Spirit House, will be released in October.
Morris Gleitzman, one of Australia’s most successful children’s authors, will also speak at the festival. Last year, he completed the acclaimed trilogy Once, Then and Now. He will also take part in the Blue Mountains part of the festival being held at the Carrington Hotel, in Katoomba.
Another festival guest is Sydney publisher and author John M Green, who founded Pantera Press in 2009.
He is the author of the financial thriller Nowhere Man and will release his new book, the political thriller Born to Run, later this year.
Also at the festival is Dr Leah Kaminsky, editor of the anthology of prominent physician-writers, The Pen and the Stethoscope.
The Sydney Writers Festival is being held at various venues from May 16-22. Enquiries: www.swf.org.au.
REPORT: Danny Gocs
PHOTO: British author Howard Jacobson.
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