NoViolet Bulawayo + NYWF 2014 Program Launch

Overview

The 2014 National Young Writers' Festival's program launch is set to pack a punch on August 26, with the appearance of NoViolet Bulawayo. In 2013, she became the first black African woman and the first Zimbabwean to hit the Man Booker shortlist, when her novel We Need New Names made the cut. In conversation with social commentator Zoya Patel, Bulawayo will be traversing the work's dominant concerns: identity, culture, belonging and place.

"For me, life outside the homeland is a story of perpetual mourning for what is gone," she said in a Guardian interview last year. "It's amazing how the simplest things can trigger that melancholy, from walking down the street and hearing on the car radio a song from home, to the smell of food, to a face that looks like somebody's face."

The National Young Writers' Festival, Australia's biggest meet-up for young writers, happens in Newcastle during the Labour Day long weekend. This year, that's October 2-5. More than 80 literary stars — both established and emerging — are on the menu, including Benjamin Law, Clementine Ford, Omar Musa and Lawrence Leung. MC Ben Jenkins will give away all the juicy details at the launch.