Please join us to celebrate the Sugarcane Kids series by Charlie Archbold.

Charlie will be signing copies of her books: The Sugarcane Kids and the Red-bottomed Boat and The Sugarcane Kids and the Empty Cage.

Keep an eye out for her upcoming release, The Sugarcane Kids and the Mystery of Angel Bay! 

Charlie Archbold is an educator and an award-winning writer. Her first novel, Mallee Boys, was a CBCA older readers honour book. Her first book in the Sugarcane Kids middle-grade series, The Sugarcane Kids and the Red-bottomed Boat, was shortlisted for the Text Prize and went on to win the Readings Children’s Prize and the Davitt Children’s Novel Award and was a CBCA notable book.

Join our Text authors at Williamstown Literary Festival 2025! 

The Willy Lit Fest program includes sessions with Judith Brett, Zane Lovitt, Clare Wright, Rose Capp and Melanie Cheng.

The Williamstown Literary Festival (est 2003) brings together readers, writers and book creatives of all sorts for an annual celebration of story-telling, author talks, panel discussions and writing workshops at a historic seaside setting.

Fearless Beatrice Faust, with Judith Brett and Iola Mathews

Judith Brett (Fearless Beatrice Faust) and Iola Mathews (Race Mathews) discuss the origins of the Women’s Electoral Lobby and the powerhouse Beatrice Faust. 

Judith Brett is a political historian and biographer and emeritus professor of politics at La Trobe University. Among her books are Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People: Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, which won the 2018 National Biography Award, and From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage,which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award.

Bookings are essential.

Join award-winning author and educator Ingrid Laguna for World Refugee Day, as she explores themes of empathy, identity, and belonging through her captivating books for young readers, including Songbird, Sunflower, Serenade for a Small Family, and Bailey Finch Takes a Stand.

Ingrid’s powerful storytelling shines a light on the refugee experience, with Songbird following Jamila, a young girl adjusting to life in Australia after fleeing Iraq.

Ingrid’s work has been widely recognized, with Bailey Finch Takes a Stand and Kit and Arlo Find a Way both winning Best Chapter Book and Overall Primary Resource in the Educational Publishing Awards. Her writing has also appeared in The Monthly, The Age, and AEU Magazine.

Free, bookings essential.

Nuts and Bolts of Crime Fiction: Workshop

Learn the hook, the clue and the twist with Zane Lovitt (The Body Next Door), as he boils the concept of suspense to its essence.

His debut novel, The Midnight Promise, won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction and led to Zane being named one of the Best Young Novelists of 2013 by the Sydney Morning Herald. He lives in Melbourne.

Bookings are essential.

From Yirrkala Bark Petitions to Treaty

Clare Wright (Naku Dharuk) and Inala Cooper (Marrul) discuss the impact of First Nations activism.

Professor Clare Wright OAM is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster, podcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media.

Naku Dharuk is the story of a founding document in Australian democracy and the trailblazers who made it. It is also a pulsating picture of the ancient and enduring culture of Australia’s first peoples. 

Bookings are essential.

Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner. She was born in Adelaide, grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in Melbourne. Her award-winning debut collection of short stories, Australia Day, was followed by her highly acclaimed first novel Room for a Stranger in 2019. 

Melanie will be talking about her new novel, The Burrow, a story about ordinary people navigating extraordinary suffering and finding healing through a bond with a pet rabbit.

Free, but bookings are essential.

Fallible Memory

Rose Capp (Demystifying Dementia) and Sean Wilson (You Must Remember This) discuss dementia.

Rose Capp has worked as an academic and film critic, has lectured and published in cinema studies, and is a longstanding executive member of the Film Critics Circle of Australia. As a registered nurse and dementia-care educator in the residential aged-care sector, she developed a special interest in and commitment to best practice dementia care. Rose works as a policy advisor at Dementia Australia and teaches in ageing and dementia studies at Flinders University. 

Bookings are essential.

Grief, Ritual, Reverence

Melanie Cheng (The Burrow), Katia Ariel (Ferryman) and Gabriel Weston (Alive) talk about the things that make life worth living when faced with darkness.

Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner. She was born in Adelaide, grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in Melbourne. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2016 and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2018. Room for a Stranger, her highly acclaimed first novel, was published in 2019.

Bookings are essential.

Jana Wendt unveils her debut work of fiction – a keenly drawn collection of short stories that go to the heart of the human condition.  

After decades away from the spotlight, beloved Gold Logie-winning journalist Jana Wendt – who ruled Australian television for nearly three decades – makes a remarkable return. In her debut collection of short stories, The Far Side of the Moon, Wendt turns her sharp eye and storytelling prowess to the complexities of human nature.  

Through these revealing character studies, she writes of eccentric yet endearing couples who dream, bicker, love and suffer, deftly capturing the wicked humour of friendships and rivalries and the connections forged by people from different backgrounds as they grapple with the business of living. From unexpected acts of kindness to poignant portraits of human tragedy and enduring love, Wendt brings the same curiosity, rigour, intelligence and generosity to each one of her stories that she brought to her journalism.  

This polished writer and natural storyteller sits down with Virginia Trioli to discuss her luminous foray into the world of fiction.