Melbourne Writers Festival
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Melbourne Writers Festival

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“30% of our audience is now between the ages of 18 and 35,” says Festival Director Steve Grimwade,“[and] I believe for a writers festival and indeed an arts festival that’s a really significant number.” After first being appointed to the role in 2010, and in what will be his third and final festival as director this year, he details the fascinating developments within the culture and demographic of the festival during this time. “The opinion of the festival 10 years ago was that your average attendee would be a middle-aged woman from the eastern suburbs, and now we’d like to think that it’s her whole family,” he laughs. “That shift in the demographic equals a shift in focus. We had Joss Whedon for the Keynote two years ago for his first visit to Australia and we sold 2,000 tickets in 48 hours – and the response he got was like a rock god. It wasn’t like your polite, typical golf-clap. I think that shows that we can really do that now. We brought a concert down from the Sydney Opera House to the Recital Centre last year, Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, which had a ten-piece band and lots of visuals. We were really interested in exploring the idea of how storytelling effects people and broadening the idea of how writing effects our lives.”

Thumbing through the program for the 2012 festival, Grimwade doesn’t attempt to hide his excitement. “The Keynotes will be highlights, all of them,” he shares jubilantly. “I think that The New Yorker is a highlight for a lot of people, it’s got a lot of people quite excited. What I love doing as a director is doing the unexpected. I’d rather Simon Callow and The New Yorker than necessarily a normal literary face in the Keynote to shift people’s expectations.”

“Speaking in the way that we work, one event that I’m really excited for is The Radio Hour. I’m a huge fan of This American Life and documentary radio, and recently I ran into a dear friend of mine who also used to work at 3RRR and was a spoken word performer, Jaye Kranz. We started talking about radio making and out of this conversation became the event The Radio Hour. It’s This American Life on stage – well, that’s not exactly true, but it’s the easiest way to explain it. We’re creating an hour of documentary radio live at the Fairfax Theatre. We’ve got three musos on stage, we’ve got radio producers on stage and the writers themselves – it’s a real experiment. It’ll be recorded live and broadcasted on Radio National, it’ll be extraordinary. It’s risky but it speaks to a breadth of writing. Radio is written, why wouldn’t you celebrate that? Why would you not feature it? Why would you try not to push it too?”

Noting the depth and grandeur of scope for the 2012 festival, Grimwade divulges that it wouldn’t be feasible for one literary mind to refine a program to reflect and inspire all of the writers within the city. “I’ve got a lot of people [working for the festival] who I trust, who are really good at what they do and who each have their specialties,” he notes carefully. “We talk about what they know and what they recommend just as much as what I want to do. I try and draw in as much information from everywhere possible. It’s really about having a wide contact base and having lots of conversations. No one can bring together 450 writers [for a festival] and know absolutely everything about them. I can’t know the best spoken word performers, the best philosophers, the best historians, let alone the best historians in Australian history or then European history. It’s a matter of connecting yourself with people who want to create it with you.”

With his time at the reigns nearing its end, Grimwade looks to the future of the festival under its new director Lisa Dempster and beyond, and what influence he hopes it can inspire in our city. “Melbourne is full of readers,” he says passionately. “There’s no doubt that Melburnians and Australians read, whether it’s from magazines, books, online or whatever. I still think that the Melbourne Writers Festival can bring more writers into the fold, into the experience of a community of readers. Reading is a solitary activity, so what the festival is about is breaking down those walls around the reader and introducing them to other readers and writers so that they can have conversations about the work. Through that interrogation of the work we get smarter and we feel more. We currently have 50,000 attendees at the festival but I strongly believe that we should have 100,000 or 150,000 in five or ten years. It does take support. We currently charge people to come which is unfortunate reality, for a small amount of money in comparison to the funding for other arts festivals you could have many hundreds of thousands engaging in what I believe is the central art form.”

BY TYSON WRAY