What's the scoop?

Hello readers and writers!

My name is George Kemp and I am a writer for page, stage and screen (as well as a ‘reformed actor’ of 20 years) and I am so thrilled to be guiding you through Sydney Writers’ Festival as this year’s official Festival blogger.

My debut novel, Soft Serve, was released in February this year and my work sits happily in the funny/sad of the world, often exploring grief, queerness, the mythic and the mundane, but always leaning its face towards a sunlit window in search of warmth.

My first assignment on the Sydney Writers’ Festival beat was The Story That Changed My Life. Six exceptional journalists exploring the effect that their work has had on their lives – “a masterclass” Ann Mossop tells us in her warm introduction. And she’s right. Shake this group of journos and a hundred prizes will clang on the floor. We’re in for a good night.

The marketing material says “behind every good story is the journalist witnessing it” but I would argue, after experiencing tonight’s event, that it should say “in front of every good story is the journalist witnessing it”. They place themselves boldly ahead of the rest of us, standing strong and smart, between us and the story. They achieve some sort of verbal alchemy; spinning base metal fact into gold. All the while being tethered to that most important of things: the truth. They turn the truth into active, creative, art. I love that Sydney Writers’ Festival has put them right where they should be – in front of their 2026 event. The front line of the Festival.

A theme quickly emerges for me: Truth v Denial.

Kate McClymont kicks us off with her usual pluckiness and tongue-in-cheek charm. As she stands under banners of the iconic Sydney Writers’ Festival eye branding, she tells a story of blind eyes everywhere in the face of Eddie Obeid’s sustained and flamboyant corruption. From houses jumping hundreds of thousands of dollars in value overnight, to his incredible “bad luck with fires”, McClymont was there for it all – the thorn in his side. At one point he tried to claim the leaking petrol in one of his properties must have been from a disgruntled beauty queen who missed out on becoming Miss Lebanon at the venue the night before. And in a staggering ‘keep your enemies close’ move, Obeid invited McClymont over for dinner. Her response? “My food taster and I would love to come.” McClymont concedes when Obeid was sentenced to prison in December 2016, it was the only time she has ever cried in the newsroom, a testament to her persistence and passion.

Avani Dias takes to the podium and illuminates the underbelly of India. The largest ‘democracy’ in the world offers a lot of places to hide things, whether that’s Narendra Modi’s elusive secret wife or a visa from a dogged Foreign Correspondent reporter getting to the bottom of the alleged assassination by India’s government of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada. Dias’s story is a warning of how easily a journalist can become the story. And how “pressure on the media isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s a flag on a passport or a visa that arrives too late.” Truth can be denied… just like a visa.

Anton Enus brings in our focus on an image of an elderly Zulu woman, in his native South Africa, who had survived a massacre. Her entire family killed overnight except her granddaughter in her arms. Enus watches, the next morning, as a photographer asks the woman to wear a shawl soaked in her entire family’s blood in order to get the shot for the front page. He learns a lesson: you can’t move the elements around because they don’t fit perfectly into a frame. You report on what you see. You report the truth.

We are then treated to a rockstar-style “Hellooooo Sydney” from Canadian Lyce Doucet. Doucet extolls “The Angels of Journalism” that have accompanied her on her nomadic and simply staggering life as a correspondent from North Africa to rural Pakistan, taking it upon herself to file stories and send them to the BBC until they took notice. She now works as Chief International Correspondent and Senior Presenter for the BBC. When she checks into a hotel and the receptionist says, “Welcome, Ms Doucet, how long will you be staying with us?”, she often thinks: your guess is as good as mine.

Lorena Allam delivers a sobering and heartfelt dissection of The Killing Times – a massacre map of Australia’s frontier wars. A vital and stunning piece of research. She speaks of the pain of reading countless first-hand accounts (often written by the perpetrators) of the violence inflicted by colonial forces on Aboriginal people. There are 438 dots on the map of Australia, each indicating a mass killing site. “That’s 438 places that need healing,” Allam says. “Truth telling and justice are not the same thing. We must turn to look at the truth.”

And finally, Patrick Radden Keefe tells us of his first story at The New Yorker after seven years of trying to get in the door. The story of Amy Bishop who, in Boston in 2010, opened fire on her colleagues at a faculty meeting after not being given tenure, shooting six people and killing three. Keefe, reluctant for his first story to be a run of the mill mass shooting (oh America) realised that the story actually lay with Bishop’s mother, Judy. It turns out in 1986, Amy Bishop had shot her little brother in the chest in their family kitchen and, having lost one child and not wanting to lose another, Bishop’s mother tells police it was an accident. Keefe posits that the power of denial in that moment hardened everyone, built up the pressure that led to Bishop’s 2010 spree.

Keefe also speaks movingly of the journalist’s dilemma: to speak with people who have been through immense trauma and gain their trust but be prepared to break it for the truth. The Bishops invited him in and “made him tuna fish sandwiches,” he says. “But I can’t buy into their denial.” He must write the truth. The Bishops haven’t spoken to him since his article was published.

John Hersey, one of the pioneers of, and later critics of, New Journalism, a movement that began to combine fictional storytelling techniques with journalism in the 1960s, said, "the important 'flashes' and 'bulletins' are already forgotten by the time yesterday morning's paper is used to line the trash can. The things we remember are emotions and impressions and illusions and images and characters: the elements of fiction." Tonight, this was on full display. I hoped that Hersey heard it all, from up in the big Newsroom in the sky.

Whether stories are passed down through generations around a campfire like they have been on this land for 60,000 years or tweeted bravely and hurriedly between air raid sirens, it’s the telling of stories – about the effect that us, as people, have on the world, as well as the effect the world has on us, its people – that keeps our global society together in the tenuous, shaking, loving, complex mass that it is.

Thank you, journalists, for all your amazing work that you do and for reminding us that these next few days at Sydney Writers’ Festival are about stories created by, for and about extraordinary people from all over the world, that those stories can change peoples’ lives and that we might come together for a brief breath to think deeply, debate respectfully and celebrate generously.

I’m so excited to be here…come with me and let’s see what we can learn together!

And feel free to reach out and say hi, either in person or on Instagram @georgepeterkemp. I love a chat.