We had a couple of interesting events listening to authors appearing at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
Our first gig was an evening talk by Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The book, about four classmates from a small US college, was pretty harrowing. One of the characters has a terrible time as a child and has lots of painful problems as an adult. Nevertheless, a very good (but very long) read in my opinion.
It was fascinating to hear how a middle-aged Hawaiian American woman could write so well about the emotional lives of men – and gay men. This was my first experience of a literary affair and it wasn’t bad at all.
The following Saturday we went to a couple of Festival events down near the Wharf Theatre close to Sydney’s Harbour Bridge. First we heard Marlon James being interviewed about his book A Brief History of Seven Killings which won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Jan and I liked the book a lot, but lots of our friends hated it! The Wiki says: “The novel spans several decades and explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Jamaica in 1976 and its aftermath through the crack wars in New York City in the 1980s and a changed Jamaica in the 1990s.“
It’s a difficult read, not the least because some of the characters think and speak in a heavy Jamaican patois. Since Jan and I are keen Bob Marley fans, we quite liked the patois!
Marlon has a wonderful deep voice with a Jamaican twang. He told us he could speak in patois but we wouldn’t understand a word! Again, interesting insights into the craft of the writer. The talk was being recorded for Radio National so they also played bits of Bob Marley song to set the mood. Great! I waved hello to my former colleague, David Marr, who was also in the audience. It was a packed house in a big theatre.
The area round the wharves was also packed with people going to the many Festival events. It was quite a buzzy atmosphere, like a sort of rock festival for old people! We had a snack lunch overlooking the water – and met, by chance, our neighbours Dean and Paula. Small city.
In the early evening, we went up into the loft of one of the old wooden wharves on the harbour for a group book reading. The authors were Carmen Aguirre, a Vancouver-based, theatre artist and author, Paul Murray, author of An Evening of Long Goodbyes and Skippy Dies, Petina Gappah a Zimbabwean writer with multiple law degrees, Marlon James, and William Boyd, author of 14 novels including Any Human Heart and Restless.
The readings were terrific. There was, as you might imagine, a great contrast in the books and the reading of them. I really enjoyed the session. We vowed to get some of the books.
I also bumped into another former Herald colleague – reporter Debra Jopson. She’s now written a novel so I had to buy a copy of that. It’s titled Oliver of the Levant and concerns a kid from Bondi who’s father takes him to live in Beirut. So far so good.
All that creative writing makes me feel guilty about my blog. I owe my readers more than this quotidian greyness. I vow to use more adjectives. More really really good expressive adjectives.
