Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2024

Saturday 23 November
11am-6pm

Addi Road Community Centre
142 Addison Rd, Marrickville

A family-friendly and social day for everyone involved: authors, performers and audiences alike. It includes book sales and author signings.

The festival is funded and created by Addi Road Community Organisation with support from Inner West Council.

Artistic Directors’ Statement

Our theme this year is ‘Cost of Living’. Financial costs are just the start of what that phrase really means. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we increasingly know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Taking stock of the status quo, we need to think more broadly. What is the existential cost of continually extracting from people’s lives when they struggle to get by? The true worth of maintaining our humanity and sense of connection to a community (local, national, global)? The worth of our creative relationships and our stories? The restorative and liberating role of art, music and literature in our lives in the face of disempowerment, confusion and horror?

Our journey to the 2024 festival

Through writing and other forms of storytelling we receive affirmations as well as visions of the future. And it’s through conversation that we develop a shared sense of who and what we are – and what our world can be.

Created by the Addi Road Community Organisation, the festival came to life in 2021 as a totally grassroots event. It quickly gathered energy as an unofficial fringe to the Sydney Writers’ Festival and each year we continue this satellite approach, acting as an alternative and an enhancement to literary activities in Sydney at this time.

What really mattered most when we began ARWF was launching an event that pushed back against pandemic-and-lockdown feelings of oppression and isolation; taking advantage of the open-spirited settings on site at the centre – along with Addi Road’s reputation for hands-on community activism – to place writers and storytellers at the epicentre of street-level community engagement in approachable and exciting new ways.

An Unruly Idea, our debut theme in 2021, spoke to this originating spirit and maverick attitude. The theme for 2022, New Lines, flagged a continuing freshness to ARWF’s content and our desire to provide a genuine and affordable alternative to an institutionalised and weary literary scene. As City Hub magazine observed that year, we were cross-fertilising authors, poets, journalists, artists, thinkers and musicians in an entirely new way, “rebooting the idea of what a literary festival could be”. In 2023 our theme was Inner Worlds.

So it is we arrive at our fourth birthday and our Cost of Living theme for 2024.

Mark Mordue/Sheila Ngọc Phạm

Program

Rosanna Barbero

Welcome

Welcome to Country followed by an introduction to the day by Addi Road CEO Rosanna Barbero, Inner West Council Mayor Darcy Byrne, and our Artistic Directors Mark Mordue and Sheila Ngoc Pham

11:00 am

Drill Hall

Until Justice Comes

The Hon Linda Burney MP will sit down with photographer Juno Gemes to discuss her latest book of images, Until Justice Comes (Upswell Press). A monumental work of history and photography, Gemes’ book features over 220 images drawn from 50 years of work. She describes it as “a collaboration, revealing the true history of Australia. The uncovering of an often-invisible history of resistance and the fight for self-determination has long been at the heart of my engagement with the First Nations people I’ve known and worked with over decades and generations.” Gemes photographs include portraits of political and cultural leaders and intimate community events as well as activism played out on the streets for half a century. A slideshow will be used to highlight some of Gemes’ photos and provide examples during the conversation with Linda Burney.

12:15 pm (1 hr)

Drill Hall

Extra Ticketed Workshop

Squishface

Join David Blumenstein from Melbourne’s Squishface Comic Studio for a family-friendly comics workshop in celebration of Squishbook! This new comics anthology by 13 local artists and writers is a very silly, but truthful, guide to how and why children should make their own comics and stories. At this event we’ll try some activities from the book and kids will do just that!

Suitable for ages 8 and up. Materials provided.

Limited tickets

12:15 pm (1 hr)

Stirrup Gallery

Burn My Scars

Ipswich born and raised, the proud young Gomeroi man and rapper Rox Lavi was recently selected by The Kid Laroi and Triple J’s Unearthed and Blak Out programs to take part in a concert of rising First Nations artists at SXSW Sydney. His debut single Burn My Scars has already made a major impact. Mark Mordue talks with Lavi about his life and upbringing, his poetic take on hip hop and where he hopes to take his music as a First Nations artist. Conversation will be followed by a brief performance from Rox Lavi.

1:45 pm (20 min)

Drill Hall

Bearded man holding a sitar

A New Class of Journalism

Tallulah Brassil and Blair Wise are the winners of the 2024 Walkley Opportunity Scholarship with, respectively, SBS and the Newcastle Herald. The scholarship was introduced to redress a lack of employment pathways and career opportunities for journalists from socio-economically disadvantaged communities in Australia. We speak to these two young journalists about their lives, the work they have done already in the media, the problems of class and what it means to be a young journalist today, as well as how the scholarship may help them and where they see their future going. A highly recommended session for aspiring student journalists and those more experienced looking to understand and develop tomorrow’s voices today.

Moderated by the podcaster and radio journalist Mike Williams.

1:45 pm (45 min)

Stirrup Gallery

Indie singer-songwriter on stage playing guitar

Hot spot: Ceffie

A recent graduate from the Talent Development Project, Ceffie is a 17-year-old up-and-coming indie singer-songwriter from the Inner West. She enjoys writing in ways involve both her own life experiences and fictional ones – creating little worlds that she can live through in her songwriting. With shades of Joni Mitchell and Phoebe Bridgers, Ceffie is able to grasp an audience’s attention at the strum of her guitar. In a day of striking performances at last year’s Addi Rock Youth Music Festival she was rightly described as another young spellbinder with all the right words rising out of her.”

2:10 pm (15 min)

Drill Hall

The Cost of Living

When people talk about ‘the cost of living’ what do they really mean? Our eclectic panel explores the struggle to resist dehumanising forces at a time when community – and communication itself – seems to be falling apart. The power to shape narratives is often driven by class: elite capture of even the most noble causes debasing them with performative moralising that simplifies and blunts, corporatising and goodness-washing the status quo of privilege over all perspectives. Art, music and literature can subvert these categorical paralyses, depicting volatile realties, pushing at our integrity and thinking. A creative means by which we stay human, in touch with ourselves and with one another – honestly, if not always happily.

Mark Mordue, festival co-Artistic Director talks to three people about this true cost of living today: Malcolm Knox, Walkley Award winning journalist and author of The First Friend, a dark satire set during the time of Stalin; Koraly Dimitriadis’ short story collection The Mother Must Die is a fearless feminist spin through working class migrant life, sex, religion and single motherhood; Steven Threadgold is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Newcastle with a research interest in class, unequal career opportunities, gambling apps and youth-focused studies.

2:30 pm (1 hr)

Drill Hall

Stones in Strange Waters

In this intimate conversation, hear from emerging writers working across poetry and memoir exploring fundamental questions of inheritance, memory, identity, trauma and mental health. Featuring J Marahuyo, an up-and-coming Filipino-Australian poet whose work has been increasingly recognised and acclaimed, alongside Loribelle Spirovski, a celebrated painter whose forthcoming book White Hibiscus will be released on 1 March 2025 through Upswell. A poetic memoir, White Hibiscus is a meditation on how trauma casts stones into the strange waters of our lives, creating ripples that stretch on long after the stones have sunk.

The conversation will be moderated by Huyen Hac Helen Tran, a writer and Associate Editor of Sydney Review of Books.

2:30 pm (45 min)

Stirrup Gallery

Dangerous Creations

This panel engages young theatre and film creatives to discuss the role of storytelling in times of crisis and trauma. It also examines how community responds to those voices. Why is it more important than ever to challenge, confront and engage while also placing lived experience and personal stories in our art?

Writer-actor Josephine Gazard in conversation with comedian-actor-musician Roger Ly and theatre and film director Ala’a al Qasi.

3:15 pm (45 min)

Stirrup Gallery

Inheritance

Inheritance celebrates the role of storytelling and narrative in shaping our understanding of ourselves and communities. A space where memory and imagination converge, storytelling honors what has been passed down through the generations while also informing new pathways of expression. Join us in witnessing how these writers and poets, Jumaana Abdu, Anne-Marie Te-Whiu, Jazz Money, and Sara Saleh bear witness to survival, joy, and resistance, offer experiences that transcend borders, disrupt silences, and affirm the generative power of art as cultural and political inheritance.

3:35 pm (40 min)

Drill Hall

Extra Ticketed Workshop

Kit Kelen: Poetry workshop

Published widely since the seventies, Christopher (Kit) Kelen has more than a dozen full length collections in English as well as translated books of poetry in a dozen languages other than English. Kit’s latest volume of poetry in English is Book of Mother, published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2022.

Emeritus Professor at the University of Macau, where he taught Literature and Creative Writing for many years, Kit Kelen is also the author of a number of scholarly books about poetry, including Poetry, Consciousness and Community, Anthem Quality and Children, Animals and Poetry – Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism. Kit Kelen is the winner of the 2024 Newcastle Poetry Prize, for his long poem Dombóvár.

4:00 pm (2 hr)

Stirrup Gallery

Hot spot: Alas, Indigo

Alas, Indigo says they are influenced by Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker as well as Alex G and Robert Fripp. Appearing at last year’s Addi Rock Youth Music Festival they have demonstrated an ability to play everything from feedback-drenched Crazy Horse rock ‘n’ roll to deeply atmospheric soundscapes that would do Brian Eno proud. Every time they appear at Addi Road their music and story are somehow new and different. On their first single ‘I Want You’ the sentiments are simple, the emotions complicated: “I want you to call my name out loud.” Have a listen at ABC Triple J’s Unearthed where Alas, Indigo writes a little bio note to introduce themselves: “I stay up late and make indie folk on my bed. Spot the dog barks in my tracks!!!!!!”

4:20 pm (15 min)

Drill Hall

The Lives of Others

Documenting and writing about the lives of others can be rewarding but challenging terrain, particularly when those lives contain complexities far removed from a writer’s own history. In this panel, two authors will discuss their recent books requiring meticulous research and judgement. Unconventional Women by Dr Sarah Gilbert features the personal accounts of six nuns and ex-nuns who were in a strictly enclosed order in Melbourne in the 1950s and 60s. The book provides rare insight into the world of the convent and women’s relationship to God and the world during a time of intense social upheaval.

The Lucky Ones by Melinda Ham is a moving exploration of Australian refugee experiences from different generations, countries and cultures, spanning 70 years, and tracking individual and family journeys from Iraq, Afghanistan, Poland, Tibet, Vietnam and Zaire.

Sarah and Melinda will be in conversation with Sheila Ngoc Pham, festival co-Artistic Director.

4:40 pm (45 min)

Drill Hall

Drawing Wonder Woman

Talk and slideshow

Nicola Scott started making comics professionally in 2001. She is a fan favourite artist at DC Comics, working on characters like Batman, Superman, the Teen Titans, and most notably Wonder Woman. 2016 saw the launch of her critically acclaimed creator-owned maxi-series Black Magick (pictured) and DC’s Wonder Woman: Year One to celebrate the character’s 75th anniversary, both in collaboration with writer Greg Rucka. 

5.30 pm (30 min)

Drill Hall

Thank yous and acknowledgements

6:00 pm (15 mins)

Drill Hall

Food & Drink

Food, drinks and coffee will be available on-site at the festival. We’re planning a mobile cafe, vegan food and a sausage sizzle. More details soon.

Transport

Bus 428 stops by the entrance gate on Addison Rd or 5-minute walk from the buses stopping at Enmore Park.
Parking Free parking in our large carpark.
Train Nearest station is Stanmore.

Booksellers

Berkelouw Books will have authors’ books for sale and will host author signings.

PEOPLE

Sheila Ngọc Phạm

Sheila Ngọc Phạm is a writer, editor, producer and curator. She is widely published and was a finalist for the 2023 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, the 2021 Walkley-Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism and the 2021 Woollahra Digital Literary Award. Sheila is an Advisory Board Member for Sydney Review of Books and a Contributing Editor to diaCRITICS, the online journal for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. She has been Artistic Co- Director of Addi Road Writers’ Festival since 2022 and co-led The Finishing School since 2017, which promotes writing, literature and collaboration in western Sydney. As a radio producer, her features and stories have been broadcast on Radio National, SBS and Monocle Radio. She lives on Dharug land in south-western Sydney with her husband and two children.

Photo by Philip Le Masurier

Festival Co-Artistic Director

11:30 am Festival welcome
4:40 pm The Lives of Others

Mark Mordue

Mark Mordue is an internationally published journalist and editor. After establishing himself as a rock journalist on Sydney’s post-punk music scene in the 1980s, his career grew to embrace poetry, travel writing, arts criticism, and an acclaimed biography, Boy on Fire – The Young Nick Cave (HarperCollins, 2020; Atlantic Books UK, 2021).

He has worked for the last forty years across mainstream, literary and counter-culture media. He is the winner of a Human Rights Media Award and the Pascall Prize: Australian Critic of the Year. He has also been the editor of three national publications: Stiletto (1984-1985) at just 24 years of age; Australian Style (1992-97); and Neighbourhood (2016-2018).

He is the author of the travel memoir, Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip (Allen and Unwin, 2001); two poetry collections: Darlinghurst Funeral Rites (Transit Lounge, Melbourne, 2018; Reprobate Books, USA, 2019) and Via Us: Poems From Inside the Corona (Riders on a Storm/Illuminated Manuscripts, 2020); and the children’s book, The Hollow Tree (Addison Road Community Organisation, 2019).

Mark is now researching Dark Star, the next volume of his Nick Cave biographical project. He will publish his first novel, There’s No Telling (HarperCollins) next year.

Photo by Philip Le Masurier

Festival Co-Artistic Director

11:30 am Festival welcome
1:45 pm Burn My Scars
2:30 pm The Cost of Living

Session – Until Justice Comes   

Head and shoulders portrait of Linda Burney

Linda Burney

The Hon. Linda Burney MP is the Member for Barton and the former Minister for Indigenous Australians. A proud member of the Wiradjuri nation, Linda was the first Aboriginal person to be elected to the NSW Parliament and the first Aboriginal woman to serve in the House of Representatives. Dedicated to social justice and Indigenous rights, Linda was one of the first Aboriginal students to graduate from Mitchell College, now known as Charles Sturt University, with a teaching degree in 1978. After beginning her career as a teacher in western Sydney, Linda later went on to be appointed Director General of the NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs. She received an Honorary Doctorate in Education from Charles Sturt University in 2002. Prior to entering Federal politics, Linda served 14 years in NSW Parliament as the Member for Canterbury and held a number of senior portfolios including Family Community Services. At a Federal level Linda has been the Shadow Minister for Human Services, Shadow Minister for Preventing Family Violence and Shadow Minister for Families and Social Services. Linda has also held senior positions in the non-government sector and served on a number of Boards including SBS, the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board, and the NSW Board of Studies.

juno holding camera with Uluru in the background

Juno Gemes

Photographer and social justice activist Juno Gemes has spent much of her long career documenting the lives and struggles of First Nations people. Born in Budapest, Gemes moved to Australia with her family in 1949. She held her first solo exhibition, We Wait No More, in 1982; the same year she exhibited photographs in the group shows After the Tent Embassy and Apmira: Artists for Aboriginal Land Rights. In 2003 the National Portrait Gallery exhibited her portraits of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander reconciliation activists and personalities, Proof: Portraits from the Movement 1978–2003, and has since acquired many of her photographs. Gemes was one of ten photographers invited to document that National Apology in Canberra in 2008. The Macquarie University Art Gallery held a survey exhibition of her work, The Quiet Activist: Juno Gemes, in 2019

Workshop – Squishface: Cartooning

Comic drawing self portrait of David

David Blumenstein

David works as a service designer and visual communicator. His award-winning comics work includes Free Money, Please and #takedown: My Evening on a Pier with Pick-up Artists and Protesters (Pikitia Press). His comics have appeared in The Guardian, The Nib and Australian MAD. He is a founding member of Squishface Studio and currently deputy president of the Australian Cartoonists Association.

Conversation & Performance – Rox Lavi

Comic drawing self portrait of David

Rox Lavi

22-year-old Gomeroi man. Ipswich born ‘n raised. Mum used to sing around the house, I liked that. We were pretty poor. Whenever our power cut mum used to say it was a black out. Lol. I was always writing poems, usually for girls I liked. Found a flow that way pretty fast I reckon. Makin’ them feel good made me feel better. Nothings really changed in the way I approach music. Rap raised me, most my words have been written in that vein. At the moment I’m enjoying putting my words through an early 2000’s indie rock lens. Challenging me to find melody alongside me rhythm. I never wanna be put in a box. Music is music. End of the day it’s all just bla bla in the bla.

Photo of author

Mark Mordue

Mark Mordue is an internationally published journalist and editor. After establishing himself as a rock journalist on Sydney’s post-punk music scene in the 1980s, his career grew to embrace poetry, travel writing, arts criticism, and an acclaimed biography, Boy on Fire – The Young Nick Cave.

He is the author of the travel memoir, Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip; two poetry collections: Darlinghurst Funeral Rites and Via Us: Poems From Inside the Corona; and the children’s book, The Hollow TreeMark is now researching Dark Star, the next volume of his Nick Cave biographical project. He will publish his first novel, There’s No Telling  next year.

Panel – A New Class of Journalism

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Tallulah Brassil

Tallulah Brassil is in her second year of journalism studies at the University of Wollongong. Originally from Wagga, Tallulah has always immersed herself in community storytelling, and is deeply passionate about public interest journalism and its role in giving humanitarian, environmental and cultural issues a voice.

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Mike Williams

Mike Williams is an audio documentary maker with over 15 years experience producing remarkable stories and building audiences across radio, online, and podcasting. Mike worked for Radio National’s features team, created one of the ABC’s first ‘podcast-first’ documentary series, The Real Thing (listed in Apple’s 2016 top 10 podcasts), helped set up RN Drive and Double J, brought The J Files music history program back to life, produced Guardian Australia’s first podcast, worked as triple j’s Special Projects producer (including the Hottest 100), was the Supervising Producer for Inside the Big Day Out podcast, and even documented trying to learn how to backflip. His stories have been commissioned by BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service, and CBC. Mike currently works as an Executive Producer at LiSTNR supporting some of Australia’s biggest podcasts to build new audiences.

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Blair Wise

Blair Wise is a proud Dunghutti journalist originally from Kempsey. He is studying Journalism at the University of Newcastle, where he has also served as an editor and columnist for the university’s student media. As a freelance journalist, he has reported for VICE on First Nations events, university issues, and youth drug use. He has also reported for AAP as a fact-checking journalist.

Panel – The Cost of Living

head and shoulders portrait

Koraly Dimitriadis

Koraly Dimitriadis is a Cypriot-Australian writer, performer and bestselling poet who creates film and theatre with her poetry. Creating art from the standpoint of the daughter of working-class migrants from postcolonial Cyprus, Koraly’s practice explores political and feminist subjects such as single parenting, divorce, cultural/religious repression, chronic illness, violence against women and identity, with raw vulnerability, to shift narratives suppressing the marginalised. She is the author of the poetry books Love and Fk Poems (also translated into Greek), Just Give Me The Pills and She’s Not Normal. Her latest poetry film, Yiayia mou (my grandmother), was a finalist for the Multicultural Film Festival and is currently streaming on SBS On Demand. In 2019 she was the recipient of the UNESCO City of Literature residency in Krakow. Koraly’s opinion articles and essays have been published widely across Australia with international publications in The Washington Post, The Guardian and Aljazeera.

 

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Steven Threadgold

Steven Threadgold is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Newcastle. His research focuses on youth and class, with particular interests in unequal and alternate work and career trajectories; underground and independent creative scenes; and cultural formations of taste. Steve is the co-director of the Newcastle Youth Studies Network.

malcolm sitting on a rock by the sea

Malcolm Knox

Malcolm Knox grew up in Sydney. Since 1994 he has written for the Sydney Morning Herald and has won three Walkley Awards and a Human Rights Award. His novels include Summerland; A Private Man, winner of the Ned Kelly Award; Jamaica, which won the Colin Roderick Award and was shortlisted in the 2008 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards; The Life; The Wonder Lover; and Bluebird. His many non-fiction titles include Boom: The Underground History of Australia; From Gold Rush to GFC, which won the 2013 Ashurst Business Literature Prize; and Bradman’s War, shortlisted in the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His latest novel is The First Friend (2024), a chilling black comedy set in 1938 Stalin Soviet Union, a survivor’s tale in which a father has to walk a tightrope every day to save his family from a monster and a monstrous society.

Photo of author

Mark Mordue

Mark Mordue is an internationally published journalist and editor. After establishing himself as a rock journalist on Sydney’s post-punk music scene in the 1980s, his career grew to embrace poetry, travel writing, arts criticism, and an acclaimed biography, Boy on Fire – The Young Nick Cave.

He is the author of the travel memoir, Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip; two poetry collections: Darlinghurst Funeral Rites and Via Us: Poems From Inside the Corona; and the children’s book, The Hollow TreeMark is now researching Dark Star, the next volume of his Nick Cave biographical project. He will publish his first novel, There’s No Telling  next year.

Panel – Stones in Strange Waters

Photo of author

J. Marahuyo

J. Marahuyo is a neurodivergent Filipino-Australian award winning poet residing on Dharug country. She explores themes of identity, mental health and the power of vulnerability; her debut collection will be released early 2025 by WestWords Books. Her words are celebrated and published nationally and internationally and can be found in Cordite, FemAsia and Gems Zine as well as numerous print and digital anthologies. She won Living Stories Western Sydney Writing Prize 2024 and was shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2024. When she’s not writing you can find her pspsp-ing random cats, eating cookies or getting on the wrong train. Her instagram is @j_marahuyo.

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Huyen Hac Helen Tran

Huyen Hac Helen Tran is a writer living and working on Gadigal Land. Her work can be found in Liminal Magazine, Meanjin, The Suburban Review, The Big Issue, and more. She is currently completing a Masters Degree in Literature and Creative Writing at Western Sydney University. She is also the Associate Editor at Sydney Review of Books.

artist seated in a chaor with arms behind her head

Loribelle Spirovski

Loribelle Spirovski’s painting practice works in the interstices between the human figure and space, movement and stillness. Working in a number of simultaneous styles, her work spans traditional portraiture, surrealism and pop art that marries dark and light themes in a single experimental practice. Spirovski paints a fragmented world, reflecting the anxieties defining the present age while never relinquishing a sense of hope for the future. After building a celebrated artistic career, Loribelle now turns her ambition to writing after a long period as a dedicated reader with White Hibiscus: a portrait in words.

Panel – Dangerous Creations

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Josephine Gazard

Josephine Gazard is a writer and actor based on Gadigal Land. She wrote, directed and performed her debut solo play ‘That’s What She Said’ (KXT, 2023, Nominee for Excellence in Playwriting). Based on personal experience, it was used as part of an educational season for the Sydney University colleges to raise awareness about on-campus sexual assault, alongside a community engagement program. Her second play is now in development in conjunction with the Addi Road social justice campaign. Josephine also stage-managed and was part of the team of ‘Nagham of Gaza’ (Addi Road 2024 with a future season planned). Other acting credits include: ‘Crime and Punishment’ (Street Theatre, 2024), ‘Human Activity’ (KXT, Riverside Paramatta 2023), ‘Sol’ (NIDA Festival of Emerging Artists 2022). She volunteers at Addi Road – her beloved family and second home!

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Ala’a al Qasi

Ala’a al Qaisi moved to Australia in 2010 and studied Media and Filmmaking at Sydney Film School. Al Qaisi has worked on many films and wrote and directed four short films – Pink Swing, Walk in my Shoes, Like Magic, Cinderella – works that won a series of awards from France, Canada, Sweden, the UAE and Jordan, with Pink Swing earning The Courage, Curiosity and Compassion Award from SFS Film Festival. Al Qaisi’s debut feature Hadeel – its first draft in a Rawi Screenwriting lab – has also won a WIFT Australia Gender Matters mentorship, a production fund from the Royal Film Commission, the IEFTA AWARD from El Gouna Film Festival 2020 in Egypt, and three awards from Malmo Arab Film Festival 2022 in Sweden. Al Qaisi is currently working on a play and film production called Nagham of Gaza. The project chronicles the journey of Nagham Abu Samra, a beloved karate champion whose dreams of representing Palestine at the Olympics are tragically cut short by the ravages of the ongoing Israeli aggression against Gaza.. 

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Roger Ly

Roger Ly is an actor, stand-up comedian, and musician. For a decade, Roger has performed in numerous theatre productions and matured into a multidisciplinary artist. Roger Ly starred as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2022, 2023), directed by Janie Gibson with the Theatre company, Whale Chorus. At this year’s Sydney Fringe Festival, he showcased his stand-up in multiple shows. Roger also served as an Associate Producer and cultural consultant on the short film Interview with a Hero, directed by Andy Diep. Roger is currently the Producer, Editor and Co-director of the documentary Grief to Hope alongside Andy Diep as Cinematographer and Co-Director. Grief to Hop is in post production and tells the stories of three Cambodian Australians Khmer Rouge survival stories and how members and how they have been processing their grief and finding hope. Currently, Roger is starring in a Whale Chorus’ Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night as Orsino in Newcastle.

Panel – Inheritance

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Jumaana Abdu

Jumaana is the author of Translations (Vintage). She has received the Dal Stivens Award, the Patricia Hackett Prize, and a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter fellowship. Her work features in Thyme Travellers (Roseway Publishing), an international anthology of Palestinian speculative fiction. She has been published elsewhere in Kill Your Darlings, Westerly, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Liminal Magazine, Overland, Debris, and New Australian Fiction 2024. During the day, she is a junior medical doctor.

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Anne-Marie Te-Whiu

Anne-Marie Te Whiu an Australian-born Māori who belongs to Te Rarawa iwi in Hokianga, Aotearoa NZ who currently lives on unceded Wangal Country. She is a cultural producer, festival director, writer, editor and weaver. Most recently she edited Woven (Magabala 2024) and her forthcoming debut poetry collection titled Mettle will be published by University of Queensland Press in 2025.

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Sara Saleh

Sara M Saleh is a writer/poet, human rights lawyer and the daughter of Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian migrants. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published widely and she is co-editor of the ground-breaking 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other. Her first novel, Songs for the Dead and the Living, and first poetry collection, The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat, were both released in 2023. Sara is the first and only poet to win the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the 2020 Judith Wright Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Affirm fellowship for Sweatshop writers, a Neilma Sidney travel grant, Varuna writers residency and Amant residency in New York City.

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Jazz Money

Jazz Money is a Wiradjuri poet and artist producing works that encompass installation, digital, performance, film and print. Their writing and art has been presented, performed and published nationally and internationally, and their feature film WINHANGANHA (2023) was commissioned by the National Film and Sound Archive. Jazz’s first poetry collection, the best-selling how to make a basket (UQP, 2021) won the David Unaipon Award. Their second collection is mark the dawn, which was the recipient of the 2024 UQP Quentin Bryce Award.

Kaiya Aboagye

Kaiya Aboagye is a Social Sciences lecturer at Western Sydney University.

Workshop – Poetry

Photo of author

Kit Kelen

Christopher (Kit) Kelen is a poet, painter and recovering academic, resident in the Myall Lakes of NSW. Published widely since the seventies, he has a dozen full length collections in English as well as translated books of poetry in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, Indonesian, Swedish and Filipino. In 2017, Kit was shortlisted twice for the Montreal Poetry Prize and won the Local Award in the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Emeritus Professor at the University of Macau, where he taught for many years, in 2017, Kit Kelen was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Malmö, in Sweden.

Panel – The Lives of Others

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Sarah Gilbert

Sarah Gilbert is a writer, producer and oral historian from Sydney. She began her career as a copy girl at News Ltd before moving to New York where she worked as a feature writer at the New York Post. She returned home to work as a reporter in current affairs television, but soon moved Argentina where she wrote for Lonely Planet and Time Out. Sarah’s writing has been published in  Sydney Review of Books, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Wall Street Journal and Marie Claire. She works as a writer/producer across documentary film, television and podcasting, with a particular focus on Australian history, and she is the books columnist at Galah magazine. Sarah lives in Darlinghurst with her husband and their two children.

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Melinda Ham

Melinda Ham has been a journalist for more than 25 years. She started her career in southern Africa as a correspondent for six years for the Associated Press and for London’s Daily Telegraph, The Economist and other international publications. She’s also lived and worked in India and Singapore. In Australia, she wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun Herald for more than 12 years, including stints as a sub-editor on the foreign desk and as commissioning editor for Special Reports. She wrote on a diverse range of subjects, including education, environment, health, lifestyle, health and culture. She’s been editor of Explore, the Australian Museum’s twice-yearly magazine. She’s also produced dozens of publications through her media company, Narrate Media, for charities, universities and companies.

Sheila Ngọc Phạm

Sheila Ngọc Phạm is a writer, editor, producer and curator. She is widely published and was a finalist for the 2023 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, the 2021 Walkley-Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism and the 2021 Woollahra Digital Literary Award. Sheila is an Advisory Board Member for Sydney Review of Books and a Contributing Editor to diaCRITICS, the online journal for the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network. She has been Artistic Co- Director of Addi Road Writers’ Festival since 2022 and co-led The Finishing School since 2017, which promotes writing, literature and collaboration in western Sydney. As a radio producer, her features and stories have been broadcast on Radio National, SBS and Monocle Radio. She lives on Dharug land in south-western Sydney with her husband and two children.

Slideshow and talk – Drawing Wonder Woman

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Nicola Scott

Nicola Scott is an Australian comic book artist working primarily in the American industry. With a history in theatre and in costume design Nicola started pursuing a comics career in 2001 and by 2006 was the first Australian to become a staple of the U.S. mainstream. She quickly became a fan-favourite working exclusively for DC Comics on iconic characters such as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman and team titles Birds Of Prey, Secret Six, Teen Titans and New York Times Bestseller Earth 2. In 2016 her critically acclaimed creator-owned Image Comics maxi-series Black Magick launched and DC’s Wonder Woman: Year One to celebrate the characters 75th anniversary, both in collaboration with writer Greg Rucka. Also in 2016 Nicola partnered with DC Comics and The United Nations to create the key art for Wonder Woman’s Honorary Ambassadorship For Women and Girls. Nicola’s latest project is the new Titans for DC, in collaboration with #1 New York Times Bestselling writer and fellow Metro Comic Con guest, Tom Taylor, launched in May this year. She lives in the Blue Mountains with her husband and their cat.

2022 FESTIVAL CATCH UP

The Program – Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2022

The Program – Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2022

Program PDF download Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2022 returns on Saturday 14 May, back bigger and bolder this year. • 30+ writers, poets, journalists and artists across 12 panels • Short, sharp ‘hotspots’ of thought and energy from 10 solo speakers and performers of...

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Building Resistance

Building Resistance

Okay, okay, it’s still only a whisper and a rumour. But Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2022 is coming. Put down Saturday 14 May in your social diary and vote with your presence here in Marrickville for a more interesting and open...

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The whole day of the Addi Road Writers’ Festival was memorably free of the stifling air of coteries, or of the ceremonious prostration before Books and Ideas that passes itself off as cultural engagement.

James Jiang

Editor, Sydney Review of Books

I felt a truly collective presence throughout the day. Not only with each panel or artist spotlight, but even seeing the crowds buzzing around between the two spaces, friends and creatives reuniting or meeting for the first time.

Huyen Hac Helen Tran

The festival was a refreshing reminder of what it feels like to attend a festival in-person and experience the simple pleasure of partaking in a lively panel discussion or listening to the passionate recitation of an author with a live audience.

Kobra Sayyadi

The panel discussion between Meg, Safdar, and Jin was the highlight of the festival for me. This session introduced me to a powerful medium where trauma, identity, and memory are explored through multilayered narrative structures.

Deniz Agraz

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