Later this month sees the Melbourne Writers Festival return to Federation Square with a great line up of Australian and International guests. The Festival gets off to a wonderful start on 26 August with the announcement of the winner of the Miles Franklin Award and an address by Maxine Beneba Clarke, author of the powerful new book The Hate Race – if you haven’t seen Maxine speak before I urge you to do so, she is a brilliant writer and orator. Readings is also pleased to be involved, presenting interviews with new Australian writers on the Saturday and Sunday mornings of the Festival and we are also returning as the Festival Bookseller. Helen Garner will talk about her magnificent book, Everywhere I Look; Helen rarely gives appearances nowadays so this will be a pretty special event. There is a wonderful and diverse local and international line-up that includes, amongst many others, poet and singer P J Harvey, comedian Alexei Sayle, and author Lionel Shriver.

In May the Australian Council for the Arts announced that more than 60 small to medium arts organisations lost their funding. Literary organisations that missed out included magazines Quadrant and Meanjin and two Victorian organisations, Australian Poetry and Express Media. Australian Poetry is the peak body for poetry in Australia, working with publishers, teachers, readers and festival organisers and has its home at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, as does Express Media, which works with young writers and publishes Voiceworks magazine. Fortunately, last month both organisations received substantial funding from Creative Victoria which will hopefully keep them both around for some time. Creative Victoria also reaffirmed its commitment to the Emerging Writers’ Festival, the Melbourne Writers Festival and the Wheeler Centre. In its short five years the Wheeler Centre has established a national and international reputation for its year round programs of talks and innovative events. The Wheeler Centre and the Arts Centre brought This American Life’s Ira Glass to Australia with his dance and radio show, Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host. It was a delightful, if somewhat incongruous, show and at the performance I went to we were all delighted when Ira called out to a young woman who had something she wanted to get off her chest – a proclamation of love and a marriage proposal to her girlfriend of many years. Her girlfriend said yes, to the delight of the audience and Ira. Hopefully, it won’t be too long before the two can tie the knot.

If you’ve been to Carlton over the last four or five years you may have noticed our pop-up shop, Readings Bargains. It’s been a wonderful addition to our range and I know lots of people have found many delights there. We’ll be starting work on our new children’s bookshop there soon (which I’m excited about) so sadly Readings Bargains will have to close as we haven’t been able to find another site. It will stay open ’til mid August and we’re running a closing down sale – all books are only $7 in-store until the last day.

Mark Rubbo