Melbourne Writers Festival

News from the the Editor's Desk in the August issue of Australian Book Review.

In a country famously saturated with prizes, the ABR Reviewing Competition is unique. It is widely regarded as one of the most constructive and needed awards, which is why we have brought forward the third competition from the advertised date of 2006. Announcing the winners of last year’s competition in the December 2004–January 2005 issue, ‘Advances’ reported that 100 new and experienced reviewers had entered, in three categories: fiction, non-fiction (including poetry) and children’s/young adult books. Our winners were Maya Linden, Vivienne Kelly and Stephanie Owen Reeder, respectively, all of whom (in addition to having their winning review published in the February 2005 issue of ABR) have gone on to write for the Review (Dr Reeder, indeed, has just become an editorial adviser). ABR looks forward to a similarly rich crop this year.

On the last day of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, I attended a session titled ‘Hope and Wright Remembered’, a presentation intended as a memorial for those two well-known figures of Australian poetry, A.D. Hope and Judith Wright. For a panel on poetry, it was exceptionally well attended, the Merlyn Theatre being nearly full. I had the impression that the session would be one of two things: either a commemoration ceremony for the recently departed, in which those left behind would eulogise the Great Man and the Great Woman, or it would be a chance for criticism in both its affirmative and condemnatory modes, a chance to make claims either for or against the poets’ work.

The last thing a highbrow hack needs is to find himself in a sustained bout of controversy with a blockbusting writer from the other side of the tracks. A few weeks ago at the Melbourne Writers Festival, I found myself a participant in a discussion about reviewing (and whether the critic was a friend or a foe) which rapidly turned into a sustained accusation on the part of the bestselling novelist Bryce Courtenay that I and the chairman of the panel, Professor Peter Pierce of James Cook University, were literary snobs with no conception of any popular genres in general and no apprehension of the critical injustices (and personal pain) which Courtenay in particular was subjected to by us and all our ilk.