Sydney Writers' Festival - Austen's Powers

Watch the livestream of Austen's Powers talking about all things Jane Austen streaming direct from the Sydney Writers’ Festival at Bowral Library!

This year marks the 250th birthday of Jane Austen, whose literary brilliance continues to delight, challenge and beguile.

Join a panel of self-professed Janeites as they gather to observe the occasion and trace the peerless wit, scathing social commentary and iconic love stories that have inspired countless adaptations on pages, stages and screens.

Consider Austen’s literary afterlives with award-winning novelist Larissa Behrendt whose forthcoming novel reimagines Pride and Prejudice through a First Nations lens, expert in Romantic studies Professor Emeritus Will Christie and Walkley Award–winning writer and proud Austen-tragic Jane Caro. In conversation with Caroline Baum.

Caroline Baum:

Caroline Baum is the author of Only, A Singular Memoir and the host of Life Sentences, a podcast devoted to contemporary biography in all its forms. She is also the curator of True Story, a festival of non-fiction on the NSW south coast.

Larissa Behrendt:

Larissa Behrendt AO is the Distinguished Professor and Laureate Fellow at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology Sydney. She has a LLB and B.Juris from UNSW and a LLM and SJD from Harvard Law School. Larissa is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. She is currently Chair of the National Library of Australia, Chair of Writing Australia, a board member of Creative Australia, Chair of the Murrup Foundation, Chair of the National Justice Project, a Trustee of the Australian Museum and a board member of Sydney Dance Company. Larissa is also an award-winning author, filmmaker and host of Speaking Out on ABC Radio. In 2021 she received the Australian Human Rights Commission Human Rights Medal and in 2020 she received an Order of Australia for distinguished service to Indigenous education and research, to the law, and to the visual and performing arts. In 2009 she was NAIDOC Person of the Year and 2011 NSW Australian of the Year. Her previous novels include Home, Legacy and After Story.

Jane Caro:

Jane Caro AM is a Walkley Award–winning Australian columnist, author, novelist, feminist, public education activist and social commentator. She was awarded the B&T Women in Media Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. Once upon a time, she was a multi-award-winning advertising copywriter and an academic. These days, she is a full-time writer, novelist, speaker, MC and TV, radio and media pundit. She has published 13 books, including the bestselling novel The Mother. Lyrebird is her second novel for adults.

Will Christie:

A graduate of the universities of Sydney and Oxford, Will Christie was professor and head of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University until his retirement in 2021. His many publications in the area of Romantic studies includes Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life (Palgrave, 2006), awarded the NSW Premier’s Biennial Prize for Literary Scholarship in 2008, and The Two Romanticisms, and Other Essays (Sydney University Press, 2016).

Will is known to members of the State Library of NSW for a series of lectures, ‘A Foreign Country: Travels from the Past to the Present’, that he co-ordinated and helped deliver for the Library in 2021. For many years president of the Dylan Thomas Society of Australia and an active member of a number of Sydney literary societies, Will is also the author of Under Mulga Wood (2004), an award-winning play for voices that has enjoyed performances around Australia and been broadcast and recorded by the ABC.

Place: Henrietta Rose Room, Bowral Library
Date: Thursday 30 October  
Time: 6PM
Bookings: are essential and can be made here. This is a free event.