Keyboard Ticklers on the Yarra

Adelaide Writers’ Week has just concluded with plaudits all round. As one book buff put it: “It’s been a real opportunity to get up close and personal with the imaginations of our most accomplished literary craftspersons.” Happily for lovers of the written word the fun doesn’t end there. For the next seven days in the city formerly known as ‘Melbourne’, we have Naarm Writers’ Week, with an even bigger cast of publicly subsidised nonentities you’ve mostly never heard of.

Here are some of the glittering line-up.

Former Greens senator Rhiannon Engels has added immeasurably to our understanding of the Ukraine invasion with My Red Square Idyll, memoirs of her time in Moscow on a course in revolutionary infiltration. She is passionate on the need for a boycott of Ukrainian exports for ‘unprovoked aggression’ against Russia. 

Zaky Mallah’s new novel Heads Will Roll imagines a future struggle between a band of Islamic peace activists led by himself, armed only with…