20 international guests to see at Melbourne Writers Festival 2017
Here are 20 international guests appearing at this year’s Melbourne Writers Fesitval (MWF). You can find even more guests in the full Festival program here.
We’re also so pleased to be hosting a full day of fantastic free events showcasing a range of new Australian fiction, and you can find out what our staff are most excited to see right here.
Angie Thomas
Angie Thomas is the author of The Hate U Give, which debuted at number one on The New York Times bestseller list. Thomas first began writing the Black Lives Matter–inspired YA novel as a short story while she was still in college, in 2009. She later expanded it into a novel after the fatal and widely publicised police shootings of black teens like Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown and Tamir Rice.
Megan Abbott
Megan Abbott is the award-winning author of eight novels. Her work has won or been nominated for the CWA Steel Dagger, the International Thriller Writers Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize and five Edgar awards. Currently, she is a staff writer on HBO’s new David Simon show The Deuce and is adapting two of her novels for television. Her latest novel is You Will Know Me.
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction. She is a distinguished professor of humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
Min Jin Lee
Min Jin Lee attended law school at Georgetown University and worked as a lawyer for several years in New York prior to writing full time. From 2007 to 2011, she lived in Tokyo where she researched and wrote her novel, Pachinko, which was named a New York Times editor’s choice and was named a great read by the American Booksellers Association.
Reni Eddo-Lodge
Reni Eddo-Lodge lives in London and has spent half a decade writing, thinking and speaking about racism. Before she was a full-time writer, she was a blogger and activist. During that time, The Guardian listed her as one of the 30 most exciting people under 30 in digital media. She has also been listed as one of Elle‘s 100 inspirational women, and The Root‘s 30 black viral voices under 30. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race is her first book.
Barkha Dutt
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and writer with over two decades of reporting experience. India’s only Emmy-nominated journalist, she became a household name with her front line reporting of the Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan. She has reported from some of the most dangerous spots across the world, including Kashmir, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and Egypt. Her first book, This Unquiet Land is a bestseller that was released to critical acclaim.
Wu Ming-Yi
Wu Ming-Yi is an award-winning novelist, but also an artist, designer, photographer, literary professor, butterfly scholar, environmental activist, traveller and blogger. He is widely considered the leading writer of his generation in his native Taiwan. His work has been translated into nine languages and compared to that of writers such as Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel, David Mitchell and Haruki Murakami.
Anosh Irani
Anosh Irani was born and brought up in Bombay, India and moved to Vancouver in 1998. He is the author of several acclaimed novels, and his play Bombay Black was a Dora Award winner for outstanding new play. His latest novel is The Parcel, and it has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and is a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
David Grann
David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the bestselling author of The Lost City of Z, which has been translated into more than 20 languages. His stories have appeared in many anthologies of the best American writing, and he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New Republic. His latest book is Killers of the Flower Moon.
Janet Mock
Janet Mock is a writer and activist who creates, critiques, and contributes to media in an effort to expand society’s limited portrait of womanhood. Mock is the New York Times bestselling author of Redefining Realness and host of So Popular! – a weekly MSNBC digital series about culture. She is a sought-after speaker and the founder of #GirlsLikeUs, a social media project that empowers trans women.
Tracy Chevalier
Tracy Chevalier is the author of nine novels, including the international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring. Her most recent books are the pioneer drama At the Edge of the Orchard and New Boy, a retelling of Othello. She holds honorary degrees from her alma maters, Oberlin College and the University of East Anglia. Chevalier grew up in Washington DC and has lived in London for over 30 years.
Nir Baram
Nir Baram was born into a political family in Jerusalem in 1976. He has worked as a journalist and an editor, as well as an advocate for equal rights for Palestinians. Baram’s novels have been translated into more than 10 languages and received critical acclaim around the world. He has been shortlisted several times for the Sapir Prize and in 2010 received the Prime Minister’s Award for Hebrew literature. His latest book is A Land Without Borders.
Emily Witt
Emily Witt has written essays, criticism and reportage for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books and The Guardian. The New York Times called her first book, Future Sex, a ‘smart, funny, beautifully written account of contemporary women trying to understand their sexual desires’. She lives in Brooklyn.
Gabi Martínez
Gabi Martínez has published 11 fiction and nonfiction books. He is particularly well known for his travel writing and literary journalism, and his novels have been selected as books of the year by Spanish literary magazine Qué Leer and the newspaper La Vanguardia. MartÃnez was included in Palgrave/Macmillan’s list of the top five writers of Spanish Vanguardism in the past 20 years. His book is In the Land of Giants.
Kevin Kwan
Kevin Kwan was born and raised in Singapore, and moved to the United States when he was eleven. In 2000, Kwan established his own creative studio, where he specialised in producing high-profile visual projects for clients such as The New York Times, MOMA, Rockwell Group, and TED. His critically-acclaimed debut novel Crazy Rich Asians became an international bestseller in 2013 and is now being made into a major motion picture by director Jon M Chu and Warner Brothers Studios.
Rachel Khong
Rachel Khong grew up in Southern California, and holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Florida. From 2011 to 2016, she was the managing editor – and later, the executive editor – of the magazine Lucky Peach. She lives in San Francisco. Goodbye, Vitamin is her first novel.
Rutger Bregman
Rutger Bregman is a historian and author. He has published four books on history, philosophy and economics. The Dutch edition of Utopia for Realists became a national bestseller and sparked a basic income movement that soon made international headlines. The book will be translated in 20 languages. Bregman has twice been nominated for the prestigious European Press Prize for his journalism work at The Correspondent.
Amani Al-Khatahtbeh
Amani Al-Khatahtbeh is the founder and editor-in-chief of Muslim Girl, the largest platform for Muslim women’s voices in the west. It became the first Muslim company to make the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2016 and launched the inaugural Muslim Women’s Day on 27 March 2017. Al-Khatahtbeh is a rising voice in social, religious and political issues, regularly appearing in media outlets such as CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC and more. Her first book is Muslim Girl.
Robert Fisk
For 41 years, author and broadcaster Robert Fisk has been a Middle East correspondent based in Beirut, first for The Times of London and then, since 1989, for The Independent. He has reported from most of the region’s wars over the past four decades, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979), the Iranian revolution, the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88), the Lebanese civil war, the Algerian civil war, and today, the Syrian war.
Micah White
Micah White is the author of The End of Protest and the award-winning activist who co-founded Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation, White has been profiled by The New Yorker, and Esquire named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today.