Sydney Writers' Festival

Peter Lach-Newinsky has won the Vera Newsom Poetry Prize (2011) and the Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Prize twice (2009, 2010). He was twice shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. In 2009 he won the Varuna-Picaro Publishing Award. His books include Requiem, The Post-Man Letters & Other Poems, Working with Poetry (with M. Seletzky, Kamp Verlag, 1986). He works a small permaculture farm in Bundanoon in the southern highlands of NSW.

• Rocket Readings

Benjamin Laird is a Melbourne-based computer programmer and poet. He is currently a PhD candidate at RMIT researching poetry and programming and he is a website producer for Overland literary journal and Cordite Poetry Review. He has worked in IT for over 10 years and been involved in a number of activist campaigns.

• Hactivism, Internet Privacy and Encryption: The Future of Politics?

Margo Lanagan is an internationally acclaimed writer of novels and short stories. Her first collection, Black Juice, won two World Fantasy Awards and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Young Adult Fiction. Her second collection, Red Spikes, won the CBCA Book of the Year: Older Readers. Her novel Tender Morsels won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

• Stella Prize Trivia

Jeff Lang has earned world wide acclaim as a virtuosic guitarist, a dynamic songwriter and a startlingly unique live performer. With a back catalogue of 14 studio albums, Jeff has been featured at major festivals, pubs, clubs, arts centres and venues internationally over a decade. Blending rock, roots, folk, blues, ballads, instrumentals, improvisation and a devastatingly high level of musicality, Jeff Lang is a singularly unique performer.

‘In a world where music is diluted by money and plasticine, give thanks that Jeff Lang is out there . . . He paints pictures in sound.’ Beat Magazine

• Words and Music
• Festival Club (Saturday)

Justine Larbalestier was born and raised in Sydney and is the author of the Magic or Madness trilogy, How to Ditch Your Fairy and Liar, which won the YA Western Australian Premiers book award, the YA Sisters in Crime Davitt Award and the FAW Christina Stead Award, among many other honours. Justine also edited a scholarly collection of feminist science fiction in the 20th century, Daughters of Earth, and is co-editor, with Holly Black, of Zombies vs Unicorns. Her latest book is Team Human and was written with Sarah Rees Brennan.

• Fun and Games with Libba and Justine

David Large is a teaching fellow and PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on allusion, plagiarism, intertextuality and related modes of textual or ideological transmission in both early 20thcentury modernist prose and contemporary graphic novels. He values fan fiction for its democracy, its immediacy and its often bold appropriation of canonical story elements, and reads the genre in order to directly gauge audience anticipation for future ‘official’ or creator-approved instalments.

• Fan Fiction

Max Lavergne is a writer from Sydney who's had some just wonderful times on the internet. He hosts Weekend Arvos on triple j. He once won an award for blogging but you wouldn't be able to tell. Everything he writes is very complicated and perfect and unlike anything ever written before.
 reallyreallyreallytrying.tumblr.com/|

• Festival Club (Friday)

Benjamin Law is the author of Gaysia and The Family Law. He is a senior contributor to frankie magazine and his work has also appeared in The Monthly, the Good Weekend, The Big Issue, the Courier-Mail, Growing Up Asian in Australia and The Best Australian Essays.

• Benjamin Law: Freelance Writing for Magazines
• Family Matters
• Festival Club (Thursday)
• Benjamin Law: Freelance Writing for Magazines #2
• Are We Changing Sex Or Is Sex Changing Us?
• The Future Face of Asia
• Now Hear This: Lost the Plot

Neil Lawrence is the executive creative director of STW, Australia's largest communications group and best known for his work on political and corporate campaigns including the 2007 Federal Election Kevin 07, 2009 campaign for Anna Bligh in QLD, and the 2010 Mining Tax campaign. He is currently working on the Recognise campaign for constitutional reform. In 2013 he completed a documentary film on the life of American artist Paulus Berensohn.

• Crafting the Message
• Storytelling and Business

Anthony Lawrence has published 12 books of poems, the most recent being Bark. He has also published a novel, In The Half Light. His work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Slovenian, Hungarian and Japanese, and has received a number of awards. He is currently working on a book of erotic poems and a new novel. He lives in Newcastle.

• Unlocked: Poets, Police and Prisoners

Suzanne Leal is an author and interviewer at literary functions and events. She practised criminal law before being appointed to several tribunals including the Refugee Review Tribunal. She is a judge for the 2013 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
 suzanneleal.com

• Meet the NSW Premier’s Literary Award winners
• Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• Research and Writing

Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri woman from south west NSW. Formerly a research fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, she currently holds a post-doctoral fellowship at ANU. In 2010, Jeanine’s first volume of poetry, Dark Secrets After Dreaming: AD 1887-1961 won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry from the Australian Poets’ Union and her manuscript, Purple Threads won the David Unaipon Award at the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and was shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize. Jeanine is the recipient of an Australian Research Council grant for a proposal called Reading the Nation: A critical study of Aboriginal/Settler representation in the contemporary Australian Literary Landscape.

• Turning the Tide: Indigenous Australian Writers and Thinkers

Mark Ledbury is Power professor of Art History and Visual Culture and director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney. His research interests are in the history of French Art, particularly in the 18th century and specifically in the relationships between theatre and visual art and in genre theory in the Enlightenment. He has published widely on Boucher, Greuze, David, and on inter-arts networks and relationships. He has most recently edited Fictions of Art History, exploring the relationships with fiction, poetry, and creative writing.
 http://sydney.edu.au/arts/power

• The Editor’s Cut

Christopher Lee was creator and writer of the ABC drama series STRINGER, Head Writer then Script Executive of the ABC-BBC drama series POLICE RESCUE and co-writer of the ABC mini-series THE BODYSURFER for which he won an AFI Best Screenplay Award. As Head Writer he wrote four of the six CODY telemovies for the Seven Network. He was co-creator and Head Writer of the Network TEN drama series BIG SKY. He wrote the SBS teleplay THAT MAN’S FATHER and co-wrote the ABC telemovie SECRET MEN'S BUSINESS. With the director Donald Crombie, he wrote the screenplay for the film ROUGH DIAMONDS. He was writer of the four-hour mini-series DO OR DIE for SKY UK and the Seven Network and co-writer of the telemovie pilot for the TEN/Channel 4 UK drama THE SECRET LIFE OF US. He was an originating writer of the series that followed. He was a Script Executive for the Showtime drama LOVE MY WAY and co-creator and Script Producer of the Network TEN drama series RUSH. He wrote the screenplays for the ABC mini-series PAPER GIANTS: THEBIRTH OF CLEO and the Nine Network mini-series HOWZAT! KERRY PACKER’S WAR. Nominated seven times for Australian Writer’s Guild ‘AWGIE’ awards he has won four times.

• Writing Great TV

Ali Lemer is a writer and editor who was born and raised in NYC. She moved to Australia in 2005. After finishing a post-grad degree in editing she went on to work as an editor and writer for Lonely Planet for five years. The author of three travel guidebooks, Ali’s work has also appeared in Meanjin, Eureka Street and the University of Melbourne Postgraduate Review. With Kent MacCarter, she edited, With Joyful Strains – Making Australia Home.

• Festival Launch: With Joyful Strains – Making Australia Home
• Michelle de Kretser in Conversation

Amelia Lester is The New Yorker’s Goings On About Town section editor. Having attended North Sydney Girls High School and graduating from Harvard University with honours in English, in 2009, at the age of 26, she was appointed as managing editor of The New Yorker. She was previously an editor at the {The Paris Review}. She lives in Brooklyn.

• Festival Club (Wednesday)
• Coffee and Papers with The Sydney Morning Herald
• 5x15
• Food: New Writing

Joining The Sydney Morning Herald in 1986, Connie began as a journalist for both The Herald and later Singapore's Straits Times. Her focus has been in international news reporting and editing, particularly in Asia, and she was The Herald’s Bangkok-based correspondent from 2004-7. Back in Sydney, she reported on immigration and refugee affairs. She was appointed Foreign Editor of The Herald in 2009, a title which has recently been extended nationally across Fairfax Media.

• The Editor’s Cut

Tanya Levin is the author of Crimwife: An Insider’s Account of Love Behind Bars and People in Glass Houses: An Insider's Story Of A Life In & Out Of Hillsong. People in Glass Houses was shortlisted for the 2007 Walkley Non-Fiction Book Award.

• Framing a Life: On Memoir

Tim Levinson, otherwise known as Urthboy, is an award-winning Australian musician and label manager of Elefant Traks. His album The Signal was hailed as ‘a classic’ by Rolling Stone, and received numerous award nominations and was shortlisted in the 2007 Australian Music Prize. He is also one of the main songwriters in The Herd. Celebrating the government’s apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008, Urthboy worked with Getup to re-imagine the song From Little Things Big Things Grow, at Paul Kelly’s personal request. The song helped raise over $100,000 for Indigenous run health and education programs.

• 5x15

Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she is the author of highly praised books including Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography and Billy and Girl. Her latest novel Swimming Home, was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, and recent collection of short stories, Black Vodka, longlisted for the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her autobiographical essay, Things I Don’t Want to Know, published by NottingHill Editions, is a response to Orwell’s 1946 essay, ‘Why I Write’.

• Anita Desai with Deborah Levy: The Artist of Disappearance
• Deborah Levy: Swimming Home and Black Vodka
• In Praise of Short Form
• On Craft: Why I Write and The Cost of Living

Steve Lewis is the national political correspondent for News Limited, a position he has held since 2007. Lewis arrived in Canberra in 1992 as a reporter with The Australian Financial Review, and has survived the near demise of Fairfax, four Prime Ministers and Mark Latham. Married with three children, Lewis is a founding member of the House Howlers, the gang of Press Gallery rouseabouts who enjoy poking fun at our political leaders through their sweet ditties. Joining creative forces with the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann, they wrote The Marmalade Files, a novel of lies, lust and political bastardry set in the national capital.

• The Cutting Edge
• Canberra Unmasked

James Ley has been a professional critic for 15 years. His work has appeared in many publications, including The Age, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement. He is the editor of the Sydney Review of Books.

• The State of Reviews
• Why Criticism Matters
• Meanjin LetterRips

• LUCKY SYDNEY: A Lucky Peach Event

Dr Sophie Lieberman is the Head of Programs at the Historic Houses Trust, where she leads a dynamic team responsible for providing programs that engage diverse audiences with the HHT’s collections, buildings, landscapes and expertise. She was previously the Manager, Science Communication, at the Australian Museum in Sydney. Sophie completed her PhD in History at UNSW.

• Collectomania: From Objects of Desire to Magnificent Obsession

Dionne Lister is a self-published author and editor from Sydney who is a cat's whisker away from completing an Associate Degree of Creative Writing. Dionne writes fantasy and thriller/suspense and co-hosts the Tweep Nation podcast and Club Fantasci book club. In her spare time she enjoys trying to keep fit and reading. The sequel to her debut fantasy novel, Shadows of the Realm, will be out in April 2013.
 dionnelisterwriter.wordpress.com

• Forest for the Trees: Writers & Publishing in 2013

Amanda Lohrey is the author of Reading Madame Bovary, winner of the Fiction and Short Story Collection Prizes in the 2011 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. Her other books include Vertigo, The Philosopher’s Doll, The Morality of Gentlemen, The Reading Group and Camille's Bread, winner of the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal and a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in 1996. She is also the author of two Quarterly Essays, Groundswell and Voting for Jesus. In 2012 she was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award.

• Anna Krien: Sex, Power and Sport
• UTS Anthology Launch: The Evening Lands
• Water: New Writing
• Bob Brown: The Future of Activism

Skye Loneragan, is an award-winning playwright/performer and Sydney Poetry Prize winner who specialises in the arousal of curiosity. Q-Poetics has grown from her work within spaces/places of waiting - in Glasgow’s New Victoria Hospital Making a Map of My Mistakes and her work in live art The Line We Draw & A Little Laugh I Lost Somewhere. Skye’s published contributions include Award Winning Australian Writing 2012, Abridged Magazine, Sotto (Australian Poetry) and Grist Anthology.

Don't miss Skye Loneragan in Q-Poetics. 

• Words Collide: Kate Tempest and Anis Mojgani

Astrid L’Orange is a poet, teacher, and researcher from Sydney. She recently submitted her PhD thesis on Gertrude Stein, contemporary poetics, philosophy of science, and queer theory. She is the author of Eating and Speaking, Minor Dogs, and one that made it alike. She teaches in the Design, Architecture and Building faculty at UTS, where she is also a part-time researcher for a sociolinguistics project.

• Following Gertrude Stein

Angelo Loukakis is the author of a number of works of fiction. His non-fiction works include a book of the SBS television series Who Do You Think You Are? . His short story collection, For the Patriarch, won a NSW Premier’s Literary Award, and his latest novel, Houdini’s Flight, was released in June 2010. Angelo is a past member of the Literature Board and chair of the NSW Writers’ Centre. He is currently executive director of the Australian Society of Authors.

• For the Love of Books

Lenny Ann Low is an arts and features journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald and has written and performed theatre and comedy for the Sydney Festival, Melbourne International Comedy Festival and Edinburgh Fringe. Lenny has been MC for Sydney Writers’ Festival’s School Days events for the past five years.

• Primary School Days: City
• Primary School Days: City
• Primary School Days: Free at Town Hall

Benjamin Lowy is award winning photographer based in NYC. He began his career covering the Iraq War and his images of Iraq were chosen by PDN as some of the most iconic of the 21st century. Since then he has covered major stories worldwide. Lowy received awards from World Press Photo, International Center of Photography and American Photography and was awarded the Magnum Foundation Emergency fund to continue his work in Libya. His work from Iraq, Darfur, and Afghanistan have been collected in several gallery shows, and shown at the Tate Modern, SF MOMA, Houston Center for Photography, Invalides, and Arles. His Iraq
Perspectives work was selected by William Eggleston to win the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. He is in Sydney as a guest of Head On Photo Festival.

• Telling Stories: Conflict in Art

Melissa Lucashenko is an award-winning Aboriginal novelist who lives between Brisbane and the Bundjalung nation. Her writing explores the stories of ordinary Australians with particular reference to Aboriginal people and those living on the margins of the First World. Melissa’s forthcoming novel is Mullumbimby, a contemporary tale of romantic love and cultural warfare set in a remote NSW valley.
 melissalucashenko.com.au

• Can Writers Learn Lessons from Sport?
• The Power of Landscape
• Turning the Tide: Indigenous Australian Writers and Thinkers
• WOW Bites
• Stella Prize Trivia

Simon holds a PhD in Biography from UTS. He has written Eddie’s Country and compiled and edited A Lonely Business: The Life Story of Pauline McLeod, which co-won the 2010 FAW Jim Hamilton Award for Biography. Simon has also won many awards and was shortlisted for the Patrick White Playwrights’ award and Griffin Theatre award with separate plays. He has been nominated for three AWGIE awards and selected for competition in two Prix Italia international awards for radio.

• Celebrating the Voice Writers’ Night

Nakkiah Lui is a young Gamillaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman who grew up in the Dharug community in western Sydney. She was associate playwright in residence at Belvoir St in 2012 and is currently an Emerging Culture Leader at Griffin Theatre. Nakkiah was the first recipient of The Dreaming Award from The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Arts Board of the Australia Council and the inaugural recipient of the Balnaves Foundation Indigenous Playwright award. Her most recent works include This Heaven, I Should Have Told You Before We Made Love (That I’m Black), and Stho Sthexy.

• Intercultural Dialogues: Love Unbound

Catharine Lumby is the author and co-author of six books and numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is currently writing a literary biography of the author Frank Moorhouse. Before entering academia in 2000, she was a journalist and opinion writer and has worked for The Sydney Morning Herald, the ABC and The Bulletin magazine. Catharine is on the editorial boards of Public Communication Review, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Feminist Media Studies. She was the foundation Chair of the Media and Communications Department at Sydney University and the foundation Director of the Journalism and Media Research Centre at UNSW. She joined Macquarie University in 2013. Communication and Media Authority, the Australian Sports Commission and the National Rugby League.

• Sex and Representation