2006 Popular Australian Readers' & Writers' Festival

Welcome to the 2006 Popular Australian Readers' & Writers' Festival. This year is our sixth of running what has become an exciting and dynamic program of 100% Australian entertainment content.

The Australian publishing industry is going great guns, especially popular writing. There is much reporting of the death of the literary novel; however, mainstream fiction is enjoying a real boom. Also, more people are reading biography and memoir, self-development and mainstream commentary including previously non-readers. Why? We think we know…

Popular writing offers us so much in the way of entertainment. Where else do you get drugs, crime, war, passion and self-reflection coming together to enthral you? We've even got Harry Potter meeting the Holy Grail (see the program). It's open to the public and all free!

This is the sixth consecutive year and it's a celebration of the wealth of talent we have in Australian popular writing both fiction and non-fiction. With over fifty authors and eight sessions each day with such names as Maggie Hamilton, Tara Moss, Paul B. Kidd, Peter Fitzsimons, Jacinta Tynan, Andrew Daddo, Steve Van Aperen, Belinda Alexandra, Bessie Bardot, Leigh Redhead, Patrice Newell, Traci Harding and Patrick Lindsay to name a few.

Be entertained on all topics from relationships to true crime, from thrillers to biographies and from war stories to a bloody good Aussie read.

The festival opens on the evening of Friday 30 June with the launch of the much talked-about debut novel The Shifting Fog by Kate Morton, published by Australia's own independent publisher Allen & Unwin. The novel has already been picked up internationally by major publishers throughout the world. The Shifting Fog will be launched by Australia's own international best-selling crime author, Tara Moss.