Week 22/2026: Island readers and writers festival
Week of 25 May 2026
This week was the inaugural Island Readers and Writers Festival, a “five-day celebration of literature, story-telling and creating connection” here in Nipaluna/Hobart. It was presented by Island, the organisation behind the literary magazine of the same name.
The festival had a range of events including conversations with authors, panel discussions, workshops, and live reads over the five days, with events held in the Hedberg/Theatre Royal and Utas’s Forest building.
This post is wholly researched and written by me, a human. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice. I do not use generative artificial intelligence (AI) in my writing. If there are any em dashes in this piece, I put them there. I do not consent to have my work used for training AI.
Island readers and writers festival
I’d had such an interesting time at the TasWriters Minifest last year I thought it would be great to sign up to some of the sessions.
Because of work and annoyingly scheduled medical appointments, as well as not wanting to go out all day and night, I decided to limit myself to the daytime weekend sessions … which ended up being seven individual sessions, and come to think of it wasn’t I exhausted after one full day last year so what made me think I could survive two days? “Work within my limits” is advice I so often ignore.
But so many opportunities to hear about things that I’m interested in! Shiny objects! Books! Writers! Yay!
The seven sessions were all interesting and thought provoking and definitely worth exhausting myself for.
I took pages and pages of notes (I measured my notebook and my notes after two days were 4 mm thick) and I can’t possibly share everything I learned, so here is two (or three) key things I learned from each session.
Readers and Writers Festival Day 1. Saturday
Session 1. The laboratory of words and pictures with Shaun Tan
Shaun Tan shows his working in this masterclass session. Find out why Shaun is attracted to short stories about strange things, and learn why good visual story-telling is about leaving out as much as one puts in.
Some ideas
- It’s all about improvement—churning out loads of material, then filtering it to get meaning from it. Shaun says his ideas come from the work.
- How you frame the image is critical. There’s always something going out of the frame. The story happens at the edges of the frame.
- The pictures don’t show us what the words are saying. There are overlaps between them, but his pictures don’t “illustrate” the words. The reader brings the words and pictures together.
- Never explain anything.
- There is always weather and time of day. Show this in your pictures.
Session 2. Secrets and lies: Finding the truth when history hides it.
Every author of historical fiction faces the same question: is it OK if I make things up? Whether it’s wondering about the worries of Henry VIII for Wolf Hall or investigating an emperor’s ailment for I, Claudius, eventually the archive will come up short. The gaps are even greater when you’re writing about events and people that mainstream society would rather forget. Did a lesbian collective really get pregnant without men? Did a First Nations ancestor honestly turn outlaw? Keely Jobe and Julie Janson tell Neika Lehman how they answered the question: when you’re faced with untrustworthy history, what story do you tell?
Some ideas
- There are gaps in the archive when it comes to people who don’t serve the patriarchal/colonialist community. Those people are not recorded.
- Julie: It is fiction. But some things cannot be told and you need to respect privacy. Don’t expose things you don’t have a right to.
- Keely: (In fiction), the archival gap is kind of freeing—because you can put your own words in there.
Session 3. Writing with our hearts on our sleeves
Some authors get into the game for fame and fortune, others for a love of language, but these three writers are out to change the world. Cadance Bell is a queer activist and film maker, and her novel Letters to our Robot Son is profound interrogation of who counts as human. Margaret Merrilees is a lifelong troublemaker whose new essay collection Scared angry laughing, or how to fix the world is for every ‘imperfect protestor’. And James Bradley’s Deep Water: The world in the ocean is a timely reminder, says Tim Winton, ‘of why we must never stop fighting to protect our home’. Beejay Silcox asks them, how much of a difference can writing really make?
Some ideas
- Margaret: Her intent is serious but her tone is not. Why do we joke about serious things? We are humans and we need to laugh.
- The “left” lacks cohesion and it’s become minority vs minority. We don’t practice empathy: We have to be right all the time. This isn’t helping.
- James: We are acutely aware that something is profoundly wrong—knowing others feel this way is empowering. Books can create that culture.
- We know civilisations collapse after about 250 years. The seeds of cultural revolution are right here. (Parking this one for next week’s post …)
- Our job is to witness. Find opportunities to do things differently and find our own source of hope.
I bought Cadance’s book after that session, and had a chat to her while she was signing it. It’s my first ever purchase of a spec fiction book, and she said it’s not really spec fiction, she just had to put a label on it for bookstores. You know, so they know where to put it. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this about genres, and we both agreed how restrictive the idea of genre and labels is. Cadance asked if I was going to the debate and I said no, I am very exhausted after today and I’m going home to recharge, knowing that I can’t go to everything.
Which is what I did.
Readers and Writers Festival Day 2. Sunday
Session 1: Brave choices: Risk-taking and convention breaking with Michael Winkler
Not every writer can get shortlisted for the Miles Franklin with a self-published novel featuring a talking goat and a terrible boxer. Michael Winkler did, and Grimmish was the result of realising he had to make riskier choices on the page. If you’re tired of playing it safe and want to learn how to unlock the devil-may-care author inside you, to free up your prose and bust your stories out of the status quo, join Michael for this workshop.
Some ideas
The only thing that makes a difference is what you do—every time you write. You can’t just be brave once, you have to keep going.
Creative fear is not weakness. It is a psychological response when our writing threatens our:
- social belonging (what will people think?)
- identity (what if this reveals who I really am? Or—what if what I write is not what I really think, but people think it is?)
- control (what if I can’t manage the emotional fallout?)
- competence (what if I’m not actually good?)
What can we try?
- Come at things from a reverse angle
- Mix forms, genres, things you love
- Try an unusual point of view
- Make things harder for your narrator (and then make it harder again. Treat your protagonists mean—and give them flaws. We all have good and bad sides. We have to give people humanity: to make them perfect is to demonise them)
- Rewrite a section in second person
- Don’t create and analyse at the same time (write the “pitiful first draft”)
- Fail better
We spent some time in this workshop writing to some of Michael’s writing prompts and some (incredibly brave) participants read their work out. It was amazing, and interesting to see people’s completely different responses to the prompts.
Session 2: Connect with your writing community
You don’t have to do this alone – a panel of experts from TasWriters is here to help you. Find out about the benefits of connecting with your local writing community, how to build your skills and confidence with support from your peers, and how to find the writing friends and mentors who are right for you.
Some ideas
- Apparently people get approached in coffee shops by other writers and asked if they want to be in a writing group! (But only if the coffee shop is Red Velvet Lounge in Cygnet hahaha … okay, this is a ‘you had to be there’ thing …)
- It’s a great idea to have different writing buddies for different purposes, one to hold you accountable, one to vent with etc
- Writing communities are very welcoming. Don’t be afraid to talk to people—everyone was once a ‘baby writer’
TasWriters has a cheat sheet on how to set up a writers group. It says, “One of the easiest ways to start a writers’ group is simply to let people know you’re looking.”
So … I’m looking! Anyone want to be in a writers group with me? Please get in touch 🙂
Session 3: Stop the world I want to get off!
Real life is terrible: let’s get abducted by aliens! Join us on a fantastical journey where we’ll meet magical British booksellers, a future detective investigating a flooded Sydney, and flying saucers in the skies above Glenorchy. Garth Nix has written more than 30 best-selling sci-fi and fantasy novels for readers of all ages; James Bradley has been predicting our climate-changed future since Clade hit shelves in 2015; and Brendan Colley is obsessed with supernatural transport, from ghost trains to UFOs. They’ll talk with Danielle Wood about the shape of fantasy and sci-fi in Australia today and how to write fantastical fiction when the real world is completely unbelievable.
Some ideas
- Garth: In fantasy we want to be taken somewhere else. But the fantasy world has to feel real even though you know it isn’t. It needs human emotions and reactions, and it has to ‘work’. You can’t contradict the rules of your fantasy world.
- In writing his book The Season for Flying Saucers, Brendan felt no responsibility to any genre or form, and he’s happy to take anything from anywhere. He says it’s only when you start to get published they expect you to pick a genre or describe your work in a particular way. (This is similar to what Cadance and I discussed yesterday.)
- James was on this panel to talk about his novel but he also writes climate non-fiction. It isn’t a cheerful place to spend a lot of time but we can’t avoid it. We have to face what is happening—but there are huge eco-collapses occurring that aren’t even on most people’s radars. The world is burning around us. James finds fiction creates the space to sit with this.
- Beejay: How do we explain that Brendan and Amanda Lohrey both sat down in the same geographical location at the same time four years ago and started writing UFO stories that were both published around the same time? The same topic but wildly different stories. Brendan has a theory…
Session 4: Rewriting families
How do you write about your own family? What if your research turns up terrible stories? What if nobody will cooperate? In her poetic memoir, Find me at the Jaffa Gate, Micaela Sahhar assembled a story of Palestinian diaspora from the gaps and blank spaces in her family’s lives. Caitlin Maling also turned to poetry when she became a mother, asking, in her collection Spore or seed, what it means to become a parent in a time of climate crisis. And Nadia Mahjouri fictionalised her own journey to meet her Moroccan family in the novel, Half truth. This session is chaired by Kate Kruimink.
Nadia and Kate were on one of the panels I saw at the TasWriters festival last year about writing as women, which covered some of the same topics as this session, because their writing is about their families. It made me think of the discussion they had last year about the differences between fiction that men write and the fiction that women write, and how many more women’s stories feature families and motherhood and children, but men’s stories don’t. And how there is this thing called “women’s fiction” that explores those themes, which men tend not to read, but there is no such thing as “men’s fiction”, and male authors tend to have male and female readers.
I was very tired by this point so I didn’t take a lot of notes, but here are some of the things that stood out:
- Micaela: Memory tells you what matters to people. What they remember may not match the facts or the history but it shows what was important to them about the event.
- Nadia: Commit to the emotional truth not the facts.
- Micaela: Some stories are not yours and you can’t tell them.
- You may not be able to write about the person as they were, but if you fictionalise them, you have more freedom. (Similar to what Keely said yesterday.)
And that was it!
It was a fabulous weekend and it looked like the people who went to the evening events and the sessions the next day continued to have a wonderful time. Thanks to Island and everyone who made this possible. I hope it continues to be an annual event. Nipaluna/Hobart is a UNESCO City of Literature. We should have a regular festival!
Habit tracker
- 15 minutes morning exercises (7 days): 4/7
- Physio exercises (7 days): 3/7
- Walk (7 days): 3/7
- 9.30 shutdown (6 days): 0/6
- Evening routine (7 days): 3/7
Summary of the week
A positive thing
My terrible story based on this picture prompt made the long list of the May Furious Fiction challenge!
It has nothing to do with the Famous Five.
This week I learned
Princess Victoria became heiress apparent to her uncle King William IV, who didn’t have any surviving children, when he came to the British throne in 1830. However, the relationship between Victoria’s mother The Duchess of Kent and William wasn’t great, and his greatest fear was dying before Victoria was 18 and having the Duchess as queen regent. This didn’t happen. He passed away just a month after Victoria’s 18th birthday.
It seems weird to think of Victoria, whose most common image is as an old woman dressed in black, as a teenage girl.
This week I noticed
Little funghi in my pot plant by the front door.
What’s making me think?
Obviously everything I heard at the writers festival.
Also this quote from Henry Maudsley 19th century psychiatrist, in his essay titled “On Some of the Causes of Insanity” from 1867.
I have long had a conviction that one, and certainly not the least, of the ill effects arising out of the conditions of modern society is to be found in the general dread, I had almost said contempt, of poverty, and in the eager absorbing passion to become rich. The practical gospel of the age, as testified everywhere by faith and works, is that of money-getting; men are estimated mainly by the amount of their wealth, take social rank accordingly, and consequently bend all their energies to acquire that which gains them esteem and influence.
(I’ve been spending a lot of time in the 19th century these past few weeks.)
Reading
- I Eat The Stars by Sarah Wilson
- Letters to Our Robot Son by Cadance Bell
Listening
- Betwixt The Sheets podcast
Watching
- Diving Into The Unknown
- Good Omens 3
- Doctor Who: “The Five Doctors”
About The Author
