Writers' Week is coming!

Oh yes, today's bookish post will not be about books I read in my childhood but about that peculiar phenomenon known as the Adelaide Festival Writer's Week.
It is, more accurately, Publisher's Week these days but there is still an opportunity to hear writers speak - if you are willing to sit on uncomfortable chairs in a tent. It may even be necessary to stand or sit on the grass if you were not lucky enough to get a chair. Yes, the event is popular.
I have no doubt one reason for the popularity of the event is that almost all the sessions are free. A lot of older people go. I have no doubt that they are readers although they often admit that the writers who come are largely new to them. That may be a good thing.
I wonder about the choices sometimes.There is a session on the first day that sounds potentially fascinating, "The Venetian Navigator". The speaker is Andrea di Robitant. I must admit I have never heard of this particular author. How did they find him?
There is the Norwegian crime novelist Jo Nesbo on the programme. That will draw a crowd. Will Juan Gabriel Vasquez draw the same crowd.  I have no doubt he is equally well known throughout the Spanish speaking countries of South America.
There is a session called "Dream a little dream" on getting published. I have never heard of Elena Lappin or Heleen Buth but they are here to talk about that. Perhaps next time I can persuade them to haul Carole Blake out from the UK?
Oh, and that session on "Where to from here?" when international publishers will speak about the future of the book? Hmmm....pity that someone else I know will not be here for that!
But we have some of the usual Australian suspects as well. Frank Moorhouse is back and David Marr is talking about Patrick White. I have tried to read Patrick White and failed. He may have won the Nobel Prize for literature but I did not like him.
Then there is Gary Disher - ah, Australia's answer to some of the English crime novelists. He is talking about "staying in character" in one session and his own work in another.
Children's literature will get a brief mention. There should be more of it. This may happen when the week becomes an annual event.
And Les Murray will be there. He's a poet, an old friend. We have not seen one another in quite a while.
His session is entitled "Taller when Prone".
Yes, "taller when prone"? I have been thinking. That first idea for a book...conception, the rough plot, infancy and on through toddlerhood, childhood and turbulent adolescence until publication sets it in place as an adult. Books are "taller when prone".