Sydney Writers' Festival clips

Sydney Writers' Festival

Australia's largest celebration of literature, stories and ideas. Bringing together the world's best authors, leading public intellectuals, scientists, journalists and more.

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Clips Playlists

2025 Program Announcement: Benjamin Law and Ann Mossop
Join Benjamin Law and Artistic Director Ann Mossop as they discuss the 2025 Sydney Writers’ Festival program. The pair talk about the 2025 Festival theme, In This Together, and how books bring us closer to one another, our planet and ourselves. The 2025 Sydney Writers' Festival is out now. Head t…
38:51
Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood: Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra
Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood invite us onto the Country they call home in Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra, reflecting on life after publishing Dark Emu. In the aftermath of devastating bushfires in north-eastern Victoria, the couple rebuilt their farm. Here, they run the Aboriginal social enterpris…
50:48
How We Learn to Read with Sally Rippin
We all know the importance of literacy for school and life, but what happens when, despite all your efforts, reading just doesn’t “click”? Sally Rippin, the Australian Children’s Laureate and author of the book Wild Things: How we learn to read and what happens if we don’t is joined by journalist …
51:31
First Fictions
Jennifer Croft, Bri Lee and Louise Milligan have earned widespread acclaim in the realms of translation, non-fiction and investigative journalism, respectively. Now, these authors are branching out into novels for the first time in their illustrious careers, revisiting themes in their previous wr…
50:16
Literary Legends
Explore the literary histories of Charmian Clift, Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower. Following her biography The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, Nadia Wheatley contributed the afterword to The End of the Morning, Clift’s final manuscript, which was recently published more than 50 years after…
59:23
SWF Great Debate: Artificial Intelligence is Better Than the Real Thing
Humankind stands at a crossroads: will artificial intelligence make us superhumanly productive, liberating us from life’s most mundane tasks? Or have we opened Pandora’s box, unleashing sentient technology that will eventually destroy us? In a colossal contest of persuasion and wit, two teams of o…
1:08:36
Robyn Davidson: Unfinished Woman
Robyn Davidson once described Unfinished Woman as an “infinite book”. “I feel absolutely that I have to write it and absolutely that I can’t write it.” Twenty-five years in the making, this unforgettable memoir charts her expeditions since crossing the Gibson Desert with camels –  the subject of …
46:11
The Austen Formula
Some consider Pride and Prejudice the first romantic comedy, with Jane Austen having set the ground rules for others to follow. Certainly, with its witty heroine and enemies-to-lovers plotting, Pride and Prejudice has created many of the tropes we continue to see in rom-coms today. YA authors Kate…
54:30
David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything
What kind of world could we create if we stopped believing inequality is the price of progress? Archaeology professor David Wengrow’s groundbreaking book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, co-authored with the late David Graeber, overturns the theories of Yuval Noah Harari (Sapien…
52:35
Your Favourites’ Favourites: Tony Birch and Graham Akhurst
In Your Favourites’ Favourites, our most loved writers introduce one of their favourite authors. Acclaimed Women & Children author Tony Birch sits down with debut writer Graham Akhurst, a Fulbright Scholar who drafted his YA novel, Borderland, while studying in renowned writing program at Hunter C…
50:16