Commentary

When Writers Sit Down Together

Adelaide Writers Festival

by Andrew Taylor •

February–March 1986, no. 78

Commentary

When Writers Sit Down Together

Adelaide Writers Festival

by Andrew Taylor •

February–March 1986, no. 78

Have you ever noticed how otherwise intelligent journalists find it almost impossible to write seriously about Adelaide Festival’s Writers’ Week? Predictably, they seem compelled to joke about the prodigious quantity of booze consumed – but perhaps they have never attended a business or an academic convention. Then well-known visiting writers apparently must be called ‘literary lions’ – an alliterative cliché suggesting that these writers are somehow not really human. There is usually some marvelling at the miracle that for once the big names (the lions) haven’t dropped out – as though there have been no Writers’ Weeks since 1976, the last time they did drop out. And inevitably there is an awkward, giggly tone to their articles, suggesting acute discomfort or embarrassment.

Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor is the author of seventeen books of poetry, including Collected Poems (Salt, UK 2004), The unhaunting (Salt, UK 2009), Impossible Preludes (Margaret River Press, 2016) and also recently Coogee Poems, with Travis Taylor, (Baden Press, 2021). He has published much literary criticism, including Reading Australian Poetry (UQP, 1987), written the libretti for two operas, and translated poetry from German and Italian. In 1975 he co-founded Adelaide’s Friendly Street Poets, and later the South Australian Writers’ Centre. He is Professor Emeritus at Edith Cowan University and a Member of the Order of Australia. Since leaving Perth in 2014, he divides his time between Sydney and Wiesbaden in Germany.