Australia’s great southern city Melbourne (“Melbin” to its loving inhabitants) has always looked askance at Sydney, its great rival to the northeast. Sexy Sydney, set along the shores of one of the world’s most beautiful harbors, and now basking in the afterglow of having produced the greatest modern Olympics ever, loves the spotlight and has always gotten it.Meanwhile, Melbourne, poised along the prosaic Ybarra River, is still stinging 42 years after the American actress Ava Gardner, while filming On the Beach, a gloomy last-days-of-mankind story by Australian writer Nevil Shute that takes place in Melbourne, quipped that the city was the perfect place in which to film the end of the world.But 42 years can be a long time in the affairs of men. Melbourne was always Australia’s artistic soul. Even as saucy Sydney was acting like an exuberant boulevardier, Melbourne was quietly tending to building upon a century-old theater, music, opera, dance and arts tradition that already was – outside of Argentina -- the best in the Southern Hemisphere.
Besides Melbourne’s quiet ascendancy to an almost hegemonic hold on Australian arts, add a recent daring in architecture (the city’s skyline is drawing praise from skyscraper aficionados worldwide), a quality of life that has produced the continent’s best urban transportation system and parks that rival the famed greenery of Adelaide, Australia’s “Garden City.”So there should be no surprise that Melbourne has been putting on an international writers’ festival since 1986. The Melbourne Writers’ Festival started out small, a sort of improvisational gathering at various venues where writers and readers would hang out and talk. Melbourne is such an agreeable place that the festival’s organizers had little trouble attracting more and more writers of note,* and over the years the event took on a more organized aspect.Today, the 10-day festival centers on the CUB Malthouse in Southbank and the Melbourne Town Hall. Events have expanded to include readings, panels and discussions, a youth program, a special food writers’ presentation and related social events.
Special guests at this year's festival include Bill Bryson, Robert Lacey, Anthony Summers, Simon Winchester, David Ebershoff, Junot Diaz, Amitav Ghosh, Peter Cunningham, David Bodanis, Christopher Brookmyre, Eric Hansen and Victor Pelevin.And, in what organizers are rightfully crowing is a coup, V.S. Naipul, the Caribbean-born son of Hindu parents whom many consider the greatest living writer of English prose, will open the festival as one of the two keynoters.Just how proud is Melbourne of its festival? On the festival web site (http://www.mwf.com.au/), its organizers write, “…acclaimed as Australia’s premier literary event (by The Sydney Morning Herald, no less!).” True praise, indeed
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