2008 Sydney Writers' Festival
Sydney Writers' Festival- Add 2008 Sydney Writers' Festival: Thursday 22 May 2008, 6:45pm to your calendar Thursday 22 May 2008, 6:45pm
- Add 2008 Sydney Writers' Festival: Thursday 22 May 2008, 8:15pm to your calendar Thursday 22 May 2008, 8:15pm
- Add 2008 Sydney Writers' Festival: Sunday 25 May 2008, 6:30pm to your calendar Sunday 25 May 2008, 6:30pm
An Evening with Anne Enright
22 May 8.15pm
City Recital Hall
Dubliner Anne Enright’s fiction is jet dark – but how it glitters. The Gathering, her fourth novel and winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize, is a story of family dysfunction that brilliantly
delineates the wonder and horror of love with reckless intelligence, savage humour, slow revelation and no consolation. She talks with Ramona Koval. Presented by Man Investments.
Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. Educated in Ireland and Canada, Anne went to Trinity College, Dublin. She left Ireland to attend the MA in Creative Writing at UEA and came back a producer/director in Irish television where she worked for several years.
She has published two collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney prize, and Taking Pictures, and four previous novels, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, which was short-listed for the Whitbread novel award and won the Encore Award and her family epic, The Gathering, which was recently awarded the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Her first work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, was also published in 2004.
Anne Enright’s participation in Sydney Writers’ Festival is supported by Random House and Culture Island.
Simon Sebag Montefiore in Conversation with Bob Carr
22 May 6.45pm
City Recital Hall
Historian, novelist and television presenter Simon Sebag Montefiore is the award winning and critically acclaimed author of the bestselling books Young Stalin, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar and
Catherine the Great & Potemkin. A Russian specialist, he has also published an illustrated selection of great men and women from history, 101 World Heroes. His new novel is Sashenka and he is writing Jerusalem: the Biography, a
fresh history of the Middle East. He talks with Bob Carr. Presented by Macquarie Group.
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s ancestors escaped from the Tsarist Empire at the turn of the century and this sparked his interest in that part of the world. As a war correspondent in the early 1990s, he witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union, and covered the wars in the Caucasus, from the Karabak to Grozny, as well as events in Moscow and St Petersburg. As a historian, he has researched the Russian archives for ten years. The personal stories he found there, his interviews with Russian families, and his unique knowledge of past and present in Russia, helped inspired this novel Sashenka.
His history books have been universally-acclaimed, prize-winning bestsellers published in 31 languages. Catherine the Great & Potemkin was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper and Marsh Biography Prizes. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards. His latest history-book Young Stalin won the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Political Literature (Vienna), is a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and is the winner of the Costa Biography Award. He lives in London with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, and their two children.
Simon Sebag Montifiore’s participation in Sydney Writers’ Festival is supported by Random House.
Closing Address: Junot Díaz
25 May 6.30pm
City Recital Hall
Junot Díaz presents the Festival’s 2008 Closing Address. One of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible voices, he is author of the highly acclaimed Drown and most recently, The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a galvanic novel that is both a big picture window that opens out on the sorrows of Dominican history, and a small, intimate window that reveals one family’s life and loves.
Time and New York Magazine selected Oscar Wao as the best novel of 2007 and it was awarded the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction in 2007.
Junot Diaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He is a graduate of Rutgers University and received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Cornell University. His collection of short stories, Drown, was described as 'a dazzlingly talented first book' by Hermione Lee in the Independent on Sunday.
He teaches creative writing at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. The critically acclaimed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is his first novel.
All prices, dates, times and program details are subject to change without notice.