Overview
"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life," mused Ernest Hemingway. A Nobel Prize winner who hobnobbed with Picasso, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Ezra Pound, the prodigal author and journalist had obviously never heard of the Emerging Writers' Festival. If Hemingway were around today, perhaps he would step away from his tattered manuscripts long enough to stop being so downright ungrateful and partake in 10 days of exciting workshops, conferences, performances, panels and collaborative events, designed to remind writers that they're all in this together…alone.
The bookworm's answer to Woodstock turns 10 this year and to celebrate is hosting a real fiesta from May 23 to June 10, starting with the word party to end them all. From then it's a programme full of unexpected twists, outlandish characters and choose-your-own-adventure chapters — a real page-turner.
Festival director Sam Twyford-Moore has enlisted the aid of five festival ambassadors — poet Khairani 'Okka' Barokka, literary critic Melinda Harvey, travel writer Walter Mason, fiction writer Jennifer Mills and screenwriter John Safran — to host a series of panels and Q&A's in which they will bestow their pearls of bookish wisdom on the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed next generation of upstarts.
Reasons to step away from the comfortable glow of the laptop screen include the travelling independent pop-up market Page Parlour, Thousand Pound Bend's Festival Hub (go for black coffee, best accessorised with tattered paperback in hand), a book club with intimidatingly qualified members and workshops on everything from how learning to twerk might cure your writer's block to the relevance of poetry beyond Shakespeare's sonnets.
See it all with the festival's equivalent to Charlie's golden ticket, see a lot at the weekend-long Writers' Conference or see a little by choosing your own individually ticketed (and free) standalone events. To quote another of the 21st century's great poets, no man is an island, not even a modern-day Hemingway.