Sydney Writers' Festival

Popular music is an arena of play—with identity, with power and resistance, and with despair and joy. Debates on pop often come down to a division between authenticity and artifice: the most authentic musician is idealised as a heterosexual white male rocker and the most artificial musician is a female or a queer male pop artist. Taking the recent Beyoncé versus Beck Grammy controversy as an illustration of this conflict, Rebecca Sheehan talks about how pop’s stakes, far from trivial, are personal, social and political.

Long gone are the days when you could write off television as an artless laugh-tracked distraction. The halcyon years are now, and if you’re not critiquing the sex scenes on Girls or mapping the machinations of Frank Underwood, where have you been? Is serialised cable drama threatening to usurp the novel’s place as the most sophisticated storytelling platform? Has the fine art of binge-watching changed everything? Debra Oswald, Daniel Mendelsohn and Shaun Micallef spent a commercial-free hour with Benjamin Law at the 2015 Sydney Writers' Festival, discussing whether television is now mandatory for our cultural education.

You may know him as an actor, but Alan Cumming is also a singer, producer, director and author. His New York Times bestselling memoir Not My Father’s Son is the gripping story of his complicated relationship with his father, and the mystery of his grandfather’s untimely death. Suspenseful, moving, brave and honest, it’s a book about finding good through bad and light beyond darkness. Alan is interviewed by David Marr.

As a death professional and star of the cult hit YouTube series, Ask a Mortician Caitlin Doughty is a skilled practitioner in flouting taboos. Her New York Times bestselling memoir Smoke Gets In Your Eyes chronicles her fixation with mortality and the highs and lows of working at a crematorium. It’s a coming-of-age story, with a dash of eventual oblivion thrown in. Caitlin speaks to Linda Jaivin about turning a morbid curiosity into her life’s work, and why it’s so important to face fear with frankness.

Celebrated critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn’s upcoming book, An Odyssey: a Father, a Son and an Epic, is a potent mixture of memoir, literary criticism and travelogue. It is a moving account of Daniel’s reading of The Odyssey with his ailing father, first in the classroom, then on their travels around the Mediterranean in the footsteps of Odysseus. Daniel reads from the book and speaks to Susan Wyndham about fathers, forefathers, literature and travel.

Palaeontology has advanced rapidly in the two decades since the original Jurassic Park hit cinema screens in 1993, but Hollywood has been slow to catch up. The dinosaurs depicted in Jurassic World – the fourth instalment of the movie series, due to hit screens in June – won't reflect the most exciting new developments in palaeontology. John Pickrell explains why this is a missed opportunity to update the public on the huge and exciting advances in the field.

When Christina Lamb was 21, she set off to Peshawar to cover the war in Afghanistan, armed with a suitcase full of dog-eared novels and absolutely no experience. Today Christina is one of the most highly regarded foreign correspondents in the world, respected for her courageous and intensely human observations. Christina shares her insights on one of the world’s most intractable conflicts in her latest work Farewell Kabul: How the West Ignored Pakistan and Lost Afghanistan. She speaks to Paola Totaro.

It seems that to be free, we are giving up our freedoms. How much do we know about what our governments are doing in the name of national security? What happens when journalists and lawyers are not kept from the truth? How do we evaluate the information we find floating across the internet – is it a state secret, propaganda or distortion? Nick Davies (Hack Attack), George Williams (Inside Australia’s Anti-Terrorism Laws and Trials) and Michael Mori (In the Company of Cowards) talk about the truth as they know it with Monica Attard.

David Ireland has won the Miles Franklin Award three times, but has not published a novel in almost 20 years. That long silence has ended with the re-publication of his backlist and the arrival of a new fiction, published in parts by Island magazine and now complete in a limited edition. David joined chief literary critic of The Australian Geordie Williamson for a one-off event to discuss David’s brilliant career, tumultuous life, and late return to the public imagination. A rare opportunity to hear from a living legend of Australian literature.

England’s pre-eminent literary biographer Claire Tomalin discusses the art of biography with Caroline Baum. Claire started her career with a wish to scrupulously examine the lives of women – such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, the actress Mrs Jordan and Nelly Ternan (Dickens’s mistress) – and has gone on to write major studies of diarist Samuel Pepys, poet and novelist Thomas Hardy and, most recently, Charles Dickens.

On the last night of the old world order a famous stage actor, Arthur Leander, collapses and dies on stage in Toronto while performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening, a deadly strain of flu sweeps North America. Twenty years later, a ragtag troupe of entertainers travel the emerging settlements as a new danger threatens to engulf them. This is not your every day apocalypse. Hear National Book Award shortlisted author Emily St John Mandel in conversation with Michael Robotham about her breakthrough novel, Station Eleven.

Best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and dramas Copenhagen and Democracy, Michael Frayn has spent a lifetime thrilling theatre audiences. It’s no wonder he’s won a Tony Award, a few Laurence Olivier Awards and several critics circle awards along the way. At 81, Michael’s still publishing new material – his latest is a series of mini dramatic scenes compiled in Matchbox Theatre. He took to the stage for a conversation with Australian actor and director Tom Wright.

It’s been nearly 40 years since the publication of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip. Since then she’s been our foremost chronicler of the intimate lives of Australians, both in fiction and non-fiction. In Helen’s latest book, This House of Grief, she tells the true story of Robert Farquharson, who drove a car carrying his three sons into a dam. Helen sat down with Tegan Bennett Daylight to talk about the book and her long career in writing.

Capital punishment falls disproportionately on the shoulders of the poor, the illiterate and the mentally ill. It was used on women, before women could vote. It has been used on children so small they had to sit on a Bible as a booster seat in the electric chair. Award-winning journalist Caroline Overington argues that capital punishment doesn’t deter crime. Worse, it makes barbarians of us all.