Sydney Writers' Festival 2010

SAMUEL WAGAN WATSON (LOCAL)
SAMUEL WAGAN WATSON is an award-winning poet and professional raconteur. His fourth collection of poetry, Smoke Encrypted Whispers, won the 2005 NSW Premier’s Award for the Book of the Year and the national Kenneth Slessor poetry prize. He has performed his poetry throughout the world and was recently commissioned by the Japanese Aeronautical Exploration Agency to write haiku for the pleasure of the astronauts on the International Space Platform. He was the poet-in-residence on the ABC’s Sunday Arts show before his current position as the principle writer for Brisbane’s 98.9FM. Samuel is a passionate ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Project.

AMANDA STEWART (LOCAL)
AMANDA STEWART is a poet, author and vocalist. She has produced a diverse range of publications, performances, film and radio works in Australia, Europe, Japan and the US. Her Book and CD set of selected poems, I/T was short listed for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and won the Anne Elder Poetry Prize in 1999. Since 1995 she has divided her time between Sydney and Europe. Recent publications include the short play, Solace, Beckett Pause, Sondersahl, Vienna, 2007, Dust, New Chamber Music CD, WDR, Cologne, 2007 and her selected poems feature in La Barque No5, La Barque, Paris, 2008. 

MARTIN HARRISON (LOCAL)
Martin Harrison is a poet and essayist, and teaches writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. His most recent books are Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems, Music: Prose and Poems and an essay collection, mainly concerned with recent Australian poetry and the poetics of place, Who Wants to Create Australia. His work has just been translated into Chinese in A Kangaroo Farm: Selected Poems, a parallel text in Mandarin and English which came out in Nanjing in 2008. He spent the latter part of 2008 in Paris in the Australia Council’s Keesing Studio working on new poems as well as translating from French. A French translation of his own work is in the offing.