Slovenians, Launches, Conferences & Festival – Who Said being an Author is Quiet? – by susanne gervay

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I keep trying to write, but I get easily distracted by the writing life – the launches, festivals, skylarking around, networks, whinging sessions and getting the professional gossip.

So here’s what’s on my agenda at the moment and you are ALL invited. The Slovenians are coming. International Award winning Slovenian writers of plays, radio and film writers, musical theatre, poetry, children TV series with works translated into 29 languages, editors and publishers, actors and storytellers are touring Australia. This week I’ve been organising with the Slovenian Ministry of Culture and Slovenian Consul, the chance to talk to these award winning Slovenians and there are even publishers in the group. There’s a wine and cheese launch at The Hughenden. You’ll meet and hear acclaimed writers Cvetka Bevc, Evald Flisar, Jana Bauer, Tatjana Kokalj, Slavko Pregl. There’ll be their books for sale too. It’s at 6 p.m., Wednesday 16^th September.

You’re also ALL invited to the launch 6 p.m. on Tuesday 6^th October of the cross-cultural anthology The Fear Factor Terror Incognito, edited by Meenakshi Bharat (Indian) & Sharon Rundle (Australian). The Indian edition has just been published by Picador India. The Australian/New Zealand edition to be published by University of Western Australia Press, in October 2009.

Ten authors from India and ten authors from Australia were asked to write about the impact of terrorism on ordinary people in a narrative short story for an anthology.  Authors include David Malouf, Salman Rushdie, Tom Keneally, Rosie Scott, and even me. Yasmine Gooneratne wrote a powerful forewward:- “In English and in English translation, uttered in many different voices like so many rockets launched from different points of a devastated landscape, there rises from the pages of this astonishing book the sound that today drowns every other concern in all but the most remote and isolated parts of the earth . . . The writers in the Bharat/Rundle anthology do not offer solutions. Instead, they lead readers along the hidden paths of an unfamiliar psychology to make their own discoveries.”

The writing of my story ‘Days of Thailand’ in the anthology was a personally powerful experience. The sharing of the journey with some of my heroes including David Malouf and Thomas Keneally felt unreal. I was honoured to be in the company of  emerging and established writers such as Gulzar, poet, lyricist, director and playwright who writes both in Hindi and Urdu, who received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in India, for his contribution to Indian cinema; and Salman Rushdie. I don’t need to say too much about Salman, famed for his Booker Prize winning novel Midnight’s Children (1981), and The Satanic Verses (1988) with the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran.

This is my last blog as I’m flying to the USA as I’m the co-RA/head of Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), Australia and New Zealand and it’s the SCBWI annual international conference in Los Angeles. It’s such a fabulous conference where authors, illustrators and publishers from all over the world meet and share writing and publishing. Then I’m off to New York to speak about my YA novel Butterflies at the World Burn Conference and to have meetings with commissioning editors and publishers.

If you want to come along to hear the Slovenians or celebrate at the launch of The Fear Factor, just email manager@thehughenden.com.au or log onto The Hughenden facebook or website.

So what are you all doing? Love to hear your news before I head off to the States and sadly leave my Varuna blogging stint. Thankyou for all your comments and sharing your thoughts.

Susanne

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Filed under Books, Critics, David Malouf, Literary Festival, Manuscripts, Publishing, Reading, Salman Rushdie, Tom Keneally, Varuna, Varuna Alumni, Writing, YA