Beejay Silcox, Canberra Writers Festival creative director
What is the book that changed your life?
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Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles. I went into that book so certain of myself, and left it with those certainties thoroughly shaken. I am a different reader and writer because of those pages.
What's a book you feel like you should have read but haven't?
Middlemarch, by George Eliot. Many, many people - smart, thoughtful people - have implored me to read this novel. But there are just so many f---king vicars!
What book do you think everyone should read?
The book that means the most to the person they love. Books are a key to our locked places.
What are you reading currently or finished most recently?
CWF is showcasing a whopping 75 new books, and I've been trying to read my way through them so I can enthuse with authority. But I've also just finished Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which is as warm-hearted and wonderful as everyone says it is.
Kris Kneen
What is the book that changed your life?
I have to be greedy and say two books! R is for Rocket by Ray Bradbury made me want to be a writer. I had been enjoying sci-fi books, then for the first time when I was a kid I read Bradbury and realised that language was what I loved. It was the poetry of the words that changed me. Soon after that it was Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell that cemented my politics. I remember my sister read Ayn Rand in the same month that I read Orwell and we both were so changed by those books. She became obsessed with self and individual profit and I became obsessed with collectivism and working for the community. It polarised us. Books can and will change minds.
What's a book you feel like you should have read but haven't?
I keep going to read The Swan Book by Alexis Wright and realising I am too time-poor to do it justice. One day I would like to have a few months to digest the huge tome which I am sure will be really influential. I have heard such great things. I just want to give it the time and space it needs.
What book do you think everyone should read?
I think everyone in Australia should read Heat and Light by Ellen van Neerven. Ellen's generous and gorgeous prose takes us into the lives of several First Nations characters, giving us an insight into the lives of others. I adore this book and I think most people will find something to love in these pages.
What are you reading currently or finished most recently?
I am currently reading out-of-print Gothic novels by Patrick McGrath as research for a book I am writing and I am loving revisiting these great books, but I have recently finished reading Mirandi Riwoe's Sunbirds and it is such a beautiful historical novel and it is about so much - feminism, colonialism, love, nationalism - but honestly you don't realise how full it is because it is a page turner that sweeps you away to another time and place. I loved it.
Kate Mildenhall
What is the book that changed your life?
Lisa Jacobson's The Sunlit Zone (Five Islands Press, 2012) was the book that made me return to writing. I read it in hungry gulps while breastfeeding my second child late at night. When I finished I contacted Lisa and asked her if she was running any writing courses. Within a year I was studying writing at RMIT and within another couple of years I'd published my first novel. I'm endlessly grateful to Lisa and this book for inspiring me to return to the page.
What's a book you feel like you should have read but haven't?
Alexis Wright's latest, Praiseworthy. I've loved all of Wright's novels so far, and feel like this one needs an extended holiday to tackle!
What book do you think everyone should read?
Everyone in Australia should read Thomas Mayo and Kerry O'Brien's A Voice To Parliament ahead of the upcoming referendum. There's a whole lot of dodgy misinformation out there at the moment - this short book is written with clarity and heart and gives context and historical background as to why it's time for a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to Parliament.
What are you reading currently or finished most recently?
I'm super lucky to have the opportunity to read loads of new Australian books for The First Time podcast, which I co-host with writer Katherine Collette (The Competition, 2022). Some recent great reads for the pod have been Erin Riley's A Real Piece of Work (Penguin 2023), Susie Anderson's debut poetry collection the body country (Hachette, 2023) and Ayesha Inoon's Untethered (Harper Collins, 2023). Most recent non-work read was Emily Perkins' Lioness, which I adored.
Zoe Coyle
What is the book that changed your life?
What an excruciating and wonderful question. Too many to list but right now, these are the ones that come first to mind: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Through the Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong.
What's a book you feel like you should have read but haven't?
The brick that is Moby-Dick, but I've read The North Water, which Ian McGuire said as he wrote he could "feel Melville peering over [his] shoulder". And as astonishing as that novel was, I don't think I will ever be able to read a 19th-century whaling tale again.
What book do you think everyone should read?
To what end? To help our species or to delight? Um, well my husband and I were both reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying when we met, so that one worked for me to find love, but books I return to over and over are Letting Go by David R. Hawkins and Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.
What are you reading currently or finished most recently?
Crime and Punishment. I'm back with the big Russians for the first time since my early 20s and loving it.
Mirandi Riwoe
What is the book that changed your life?
I don't think there is one book that changed my life. Rather, I would say that it was all the books I read and adored as a child that inspired me to be an author one day - The Secret Seven, Nancy Drew, Little Women and so forth.
What's a book you feel like you should have read but haven't?
Middlemarch. So many people rave about it being their favourite novel, but I've tried to read it a couple of times and couldn't finish it. I will persevere (sometime in the future).
What book do you think everyone should read?
The book I gave to each of my daughters when they were teenagers was Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. When I originally read this novel many years ago, it seemed like a grim cautionary tale, speculative fiction, a "what if" story. Unfortunately, for young women in today's world (like my daughters), some aspects of The Handmaid's Tale are too close for comfort.
What are you reading currently or finished most recently?
Just recently I finally read Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, and I could not have loved it more.
Kate Evans
What is the book that changed your life?
Isn't it always both the last book and the next one? An accretion of words, perspectives, surprises, rereads, rethinking? It was The Crystal Cave (Mary Stewart) as a child, as well as the intensity of D.H. Lawrence as an early teenager (even if I did go right off him not long after), and then the lushness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in my early 20s, and the feminist passion of Jeanette Winterson after that ("I'm telling you stories, trust me"). For every book listed there are another hundred sitting behind it (tall tales with Peter Carey's Illywacker and sobbing over Helen Garner's Honour and Other People's Children; the poetic brutality of Louise Erdrich and Melissa Lucashenko, the manic playfulness of James Ellroy on his good days (that LA quartet), the smart-talking sass of detective literature (V.I. Warshawski, how are you these days?), the surprise of Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things, and the sheer intellectual heft of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. I'm writing this only halfway through my second coffee so entire genres, books close to my heart, sweeps of reading, have been left out. I'll either go on forever or stop now.
What's a book you feel like you should have read but haven't?
So much, so much readerly guilt. Proust for the win, on the obvious front, but also (shame shame shame) Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and most of Patrick White. I battle with this every week, as part of my job, as the list of things I'm NOT reading expands.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Oh dear, I'm not good at being prescriptive. I just hope everyone finds their own bookshelf, be it full of dragons or angst or action or introspection or graphic novels.
What are you reading currently or finished most recently?
Claire Kilroy's Soldier Sailor (because there is so much great Irish fiction at the moment - and this one is blazingly good); Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto (violent, clever, funny, plus remaking Harlem); Elizabeth McCracken's The Hero of this Book (creativity, attention to detail, grief and loss - and sharply funny).
Clare Wright
What is the book that changed your life?
The book that changed my life is Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd. The copy I have has a TERRIBLE cover and an even worse subtitle (A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine) but given that it is still in print after almost 20 years suggests I'm not the only person/woman to have been deeply affected by its wisdom, grace and reassurance that the personal is not only political, but also spiritual.
What's a book you feel like you should have read but haven't?
I have TRIED to read Wolf Hall, believe me, I really have. Maybe I should try again. Everybody assumes I must love Hilary Mantel. I love to listen to her speak, but sheesh, just can't do the books.
What book do you think everyone should read?
I think everyone should read Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down. If you're not triggered by it, you're lucky. If you are, it might be time to figure out why. A lush, languorous, open-hearted psychological litmus test and affront to the subconscious.
What are you reading currently or finished most recently?
I'm concurrently reading Professor Megan Davis's Quarterly Essay: Voice of Reason, with admiration for her fierce intellect and tremendous capacity for generosity and long-haul hope. And Edwina Preston's Bad Art Mother, which is an unexpected gem of a novel.
Stephen Romei
What is the book that changed your life?
Different books change your life at different times. I think of the books that were the first planks in a bridge from the children's library to the adult one, such as Wilbur Smith's When the Lion Feeds (first published in 1964, the year of my birth). Is it a literary masterpiece? No way. Yet it changed my life at the time. Not long after, I stepped onto the most important bridge of my young reading life, Colin Wilson's 1956 work of philosophical nonfiction The Outsider. It was here that, for the first time, I encountered writers such as Kafka, Camus, Sartre, T.S. Eliot, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and many others. From this one book I compiled a reading list that helped me become the reader I am. If forced to choose the one book that changed my life, this is the one. Then there is the life beyond the reading life. Here, two books made me aware of something I still think about every day, the relationship between humans and non-human animals: Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975) and Matthew Scully's Dominion (2002) . Finally, at my present age, Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan's book-length conversation, Faith, Hope and Carnage (2022), has made me rethink the way I want to live now.
What's a book you feel like you should have read but haven't?
There are so many! But the answer for this non-churchgoer is easy: The Bible.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Again, there are so many! But again the answer comes to mind immediately: George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. If there is a book more relevant to the world we have lived in since it was published in 1949, and still live in now, I haven't read it.
What are you reading currently or finished most recently?
My pick of the books of 2023, so far, is J.M. Coetzee's The Pole and Other Stories. The titular, novella-length opening story is one of the most unconventional and remarkable love stories I have read.
Kim Northwood
What is the book that changed your life?
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty. His history of wealth and inequality hugely impacted my understanding of our society.
What's a book you feel like you should have read but haven't?
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garca Marquez. It is often cited as one of the defining books of magical realism and has been recommended to me by so many people.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. Using original research, the book provides an amazing overview of how our automatic thinking systems can mislead us.
What are you reading currently or finished most recently?
The Uncaged Sky, by Kylie Moore-Gilbert. A gripping account of her time being held in an Iranian prison.
Tracey Spicer
What is the book that changed your life?
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I love his succinct prose. The heartbreaking story of migratory workers really resonates during this fourth Industrial Revolution.
What's a book you feel like you should have read but haven't?
I love this question. Over the years, I've managed to finish War and Peace, The Odyssey and Crime and Punishment, but I haven't read Ulysses by James Joyce. Maybe it's the stream of consciousness technique that I find off-putting. You've reminded me to give it another crack!
What book do you think everyone should read?
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. She's a genius. Evaristo subverts the structure of the traditional novel to address complex issues of feminism and race. It's a rich tapestry. I also reckon everyone should read Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men by Caroline Criado Perez.
What are you reading currently or finished most recently?
Earlier this year, I read The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which is a wildly creative work of fiction by Shehan Karunatilaka. Recently, I finished Claire G. Coleman's dystopian work, Enclave.
- Canberra Writers Festival is on August 16-20. canberrawritersfestival.com.au
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