World’s First Exclusively Online Writers’ Festival Announced for 2014

Writers' festivals are getting more and more 'with it' these days. People wear shirts with hashtags on them, you're encouraged to live-tweet questions for authors on panels, and the events are no longer held at local library reading rooms, but cool back-alley warehouse spaces. The kind of place where everyone's wearing black-rimmed glasses and talking about Tao Lin.

All this is old news now however, as the Emerging Writers' Festival has just announced the creation of the world's first exclusively online writers' festival to take place in February 2014. While writers' festivals once lamented the damning effects of the internet and digital technology on the written word, the Digital Writers' Festival will be a 12-day celebration of it. Digital publishing, eBooks, alt lit, fan fic, webcams and Twitterbots — the publishing industry and the nature of writing itself has transformed dramatically in even the past few years, and DWF is going to be a dedicated space in which to examine it.

This also has a huge impact on accessibility. Do you live in the Northern Territory and always feel jealous when you see pictures of the Melbourne Writers' Festival? Maybe you live in Melbourne, but never felt quite cool enough to head along to the events. Perhaps you tried, but got lost looking for the event down a laneway? The DWF will be the first truly accessible festival for a vast array of people all over country, and more than that, the world.

Admittedly it could all be a little confusing though. We talked to the new DWF Director, Connor Tomas O'Brien about what the festival will be and how it will all work. We talked on Twitter because that's what the cool kids do now, right? Right?

The full DWF program of events and artists will be released in January 2014.