AustLit

'Writers’ festivals are strange institutions, often literature-adjacent rather than literary. Discussions tend to revolve around the idea of books rather than the books themselves: what a book means, how it was made, how the author feels about it. When we subject writers to interrogation before an audience, what is it we want from them? Too often, we act as if the book were a question and the author an answer. Such an approach is dangerous. A culture in which intellectual conversation cannot account for the complexity of literature will equally be unable to reckon with the complexity of things like language, identity, race. On Saturday, when a white Australian interviewer asked an African American writer why, given America’s vigorous policing of language and affirmative action policies, racial inequality continues to be rampant –‘I would expect that you’d find a highly racist society to have a highly racist language’ – Australia’s particular failure of cultural imagination was on display.' (Introduction)