The partnership between Vision Australia Radio and the Melbourne Writers Festival continues again this year with the broadcasting of high-profile author interviews, social media interactions and the ongoing accessible program formatting.
Including and engaging with a diverse audience takes a multi-level approach.
For the last number of years Vision Australia Radio has produced the Festival’s program in audio format, making the events programme accessible to the blind, low vision and print disability community.
Listen to the Melbourne Writers Festival audio guide here.
Whats on offer at the 2024 festival?
Melbourne Writers Festival has officially launched its full 2024 program with a bevy of local and international literary talent bound for Melbourne this May.
Returning to venues across the CBD and surrounds from 6–12 May, the 2024 Festival gathers one of the largest literary line-ups seen in the city for some time in a fitting final program for outgoing Artistic Director Michaela McGuire.
The event’s blockbuster bill is brimming with Pulitzer and Booker Prize highlights, New York Times bestselling authors aplenty, first-time guests and MWF exclusives from around the globe. McGuire has programmed a stellar four days of conversations, talks, workshops, panels and events brought together under this year’s theme of Ghosts: from ghostly characters, ghosts in the machine and ghostwriters to those enduring stories that continue to haunt us. Festival curators Mykaela Saunders and Ziggy Ramo have also programmed five curious, critical and hopeful events that imagine different futures for our world and interrogate what it means to be human.
In her first visit to Australia in more than a decade beloved US author Ann Patchett arrives off the back of Tom Lake, the latest bestseller in a long career spent crafting treasured novels. Patchett is joined by her friend and fellow acclaimed author Meg Mason (Sorrow and Bliss) to discuss the unwritten novels of their pasts, the manuscripts they discarded at the bottom of a drawer – which for Patchett was the entire first draft of Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Dutch House – and the books read long ago that have stayed in their literary imaginations ever since.
Global literary stars don’t get much bigger than Japanese writer Toshikazu Kawaguchi whose debut novel, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, has sold over a million copies and amassed an international readership. With the book’s various sequels now verifying him as a bonafide publishing phenomenon, Kawaguchi makes his Australian debut to discuss his much-loved works and forthcoming TV adaption, exclusively at Melbourne Writers Festival.
And arriving fresh from his Booker Prize crowning in 2023, Irish novelist Paul Lynch appears in a special MWF event in late May to discuss his cautionary fable of society on the brink, Prophet Song.
Introducing her final program, MWF Artistic Director Michaela McGuire, said: “After nine incredibly rewarding years programming writers festivals, I’ve never been more proud of a line-up than this one. Old and new favourites come together in smart and surprising combinations to discuss the ghosts of history, past mistakes, past selves and the stories that haunt them. I count myself as an extremely fortunate literary citizen of Melbourne to be in the finest possible company this May.”
Keep listening to Vision Australia Radio for more on this year’s festival and visit mwf.com.au for further information on events
