Publishers take note. The next generation of best-selling authors are to be found in the prison system, if the recent Sydney Writers' Festival is anything to go by. Belfast author, Ronan Bennett, interned in the Maze for two years in his late teens, was one of the festival's main attractions, perhaps not entirely unconnected to the volume of pre-festival media coverage he received.
Another former "political prisoner", black-American activist, academic and author Angela Davis, drew over 700 people to her talk about the privatisation of the prison system in the US and its "dangerous resonances with the industrial-military complex". Maori writer, Alan Duff, author of Once Were Warriors - also a hugely successful film - talked about his imprisonment as a youth before he became an author. And those three were only the ones who publicly declared themselves former guests of their respective governments.
Bennett, the quietly spoken, boyish and almost shy narrator when reading from his latest novel The Catastrophist, became more of the political, nationalist orator during a panel session on Fiction and Politics alongside writers from other "highly-politicised" societies, Vietnam's Ho Anh Thai and Israel's Orly Castel-Bloom. When he began writing in the late-1980s, he said, he became aware of the absence of recent, nationalist experiences in fiction, events such as Bloody Sunday, the Civil Rights movement, internment and "the killing of our children on our streets by British soldiers . . . our beautiful children shot in the face with plastic bullets". Despite criticism of his first two novels, which were set in the North, he still wanted to explore the role of the writer in a divided society but from "a necessary distance". So The Catastrophist, albeit with an Irish writer as its central character, is set in the Congo.
Novelist and Irish Times journalist, Mary Morrissy, attending the festival on a "Suspended Sentence" Fellowship jointly funded by the James Joyce Foundation in Sydney and the Irish Writers' Centre in Dublin, and novelist and script-writer Kate O'Riordan, swelled the ranks of Irish participants. Each drew audiences of 200-plus to their readings. Robert Fisk - journalist, author and sometime Dublin resident - disappointingly had to cancel his visit due to the crisis in Kosovo. According to the festival's director, Meredith Curnow, he would have been the biggest audience-puller. And, by a stretch of the imagination, one could include in the Irish contingent Shani Mootoo, the Dublin-born child of Trinidadian parents, whose first novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, became an overnight publishing sensation in 1998.
The setting couldn't have been more idyllic. Most sessions took place a stone's throw from the Harbour Bridge, in one of the city's old wooden wharfs. Over the four days, some 26,600 people mingled in the autumn sunshine with international and Australian novelists, poets, cartoonists, playwrights and critics, as pleasure craft and ferries chugged by. They happily drifted in and out of sessions on football, the media, politics, science fiction and fantasy, children's television, not to mention the popular mid-afternoon readings sponsored by Baileys.
The festival, in only its second year as a separate entity from the Sydney Arts Festival, had no stated theme. "We don't believe in themes. They're too restricting. We aim to offer something for everyone, young and old," Curnow says. The festival has been lambasted in previous years for being too dominated by fiction and geared towards a middle-aged audience. To prove that those criticisms have been absorbed, she points out that the top billing of this year's festival was the Kids' Night Out, attended by 840 young readers and their parents.
The biggest excitement, however, was the news that one of its guests, Andrew Motion, had been appointed Poet Laureate. Better still was that the word got out while Motion was in Sydney, and Buckingham Palace was furious at the leak. With Australia in the throes of a debate about becoming a republic, there were thinly-veiled, gleeful references in the media to pro-republican comments made by Motion in an interview last January.
Alan Duff, to much laughter from the audience, had used the Royal Family to illustrate his hatred for authority, especially inherited authority: "I hate the Royal Family bludgers," he said. "But like a true hypocrite, I accepted an MBE from them." Could that have been his pitch to become Motion's successor, the first black Poet Laureate from the former British colonies?
