The Melbourne Writers Festival is one of Australia’s oldest writers’ festivals. Launched in 1986, its first two years were held at the Athenaeum Theatre in Collins Street. Early guests included Margaret Atwood, Vikram Seth, Angela Carter, August Kleinzahler and A.S. Byatt from overseas, and Australian writers Frank Moorhouse, Elizabeth Jolley, Kevin Gilbert and Helen Garner. The first program director was author Colin Talbot, assisted by a board that included critic Peter Craven, publisher Michael Heyward and writer Helen Garner. Thirty-six years later, the festival is re- emerging from Covid under the artistic direction of Michaela McGuire who is widely acknowledged as one of Australia’s most creative and innovative festival directors. Michaela has the ability to weave a disparate group of guests into a narrative full of surprises, delights and stimulation. Formerly artistic director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Michaela was appointed to her current role just after Covid hit. This year’s festival, which starts on 8 September at the State Library and other venues, is her first one that will be largely held in person, and she’s managed to entice some exciting international guests. Most of all it’s a chance for you to get an insight into the thoughts and views of many of Australia’s best creators and thinkers. I’m very excited and hope to see many of you there.

Two of the authors who we chose for the Melbourne City Reads program will be at the festival in their first public appearances talking about their books. Jay Carmichael’s fantastic book, Marlo, explores what it was like to be gay in Melbourne in the 1950s. It’s painful and uplifting at the same time. Sophie Cunningham’s first novel for many years is This Devastating Fever; it’s an ambitious work that explores the relationship between Leonard and Virginia Woolf through the eyes of a Melbourne writer and researcher. Readings and the other Melbourne City Reads bookshops (Dymocks Melbourne, Hill of Content, Mary Martin Bookshop and the Paperback Bookshop) have both these books at special prices.

We’ve just announced the shortlists for our three Readings Prizes – one for new Australian fiction, one for young adult fiction, and one for children’s fiction – which you will find on the next page. We began the prize in 2014; it was during a slump in the book industry. In an attempt to keep our heads above water we too had been concentrating our efforts on big-name authors. I realised that in doing so we’d abandoned the writers who needed our support the most, those writers with a marvellous first or second- time book. Establishing the prize seemed a good way to refocus our attention on authors who most need a bookshop’s support to be noticed by readers. Andrew Pippos, whose novel Lucky’s won last year’s Readings New Australian Fiction Prize, wrote: ‘It’s wonderfully humbling for my novel to be publicly recognised in this way.’

Mark Rubbo is the managing director of Readings.