Addi Road Writers' Festival 2026

Saturday 16 May, 11am to 6pm

Theme: “Truth Beauty”

Tickets – $50

= Early Bird tickets $40 (limited release)

★ Affordable Tickets $20 (students, unemployed, others)

Tickets provide open access to ALL events on the day pending hall, gallery, and theatre capacity for each panel.

As a community centre we offer 'affordable tickets' to ensure access to the event for anyone who would like to attend. We trust that people will purchase tickets according their abilities and do not want cost to be an obstacle to access.

Food and coffee available – with an open green area for relaxing; family and pet-friendly outside on the green between our venues where talks and performances take place all day.

Addi Road Writers Festival 2026 explores the theme 'Truth Beauty'. The event features...

ten panels and talks across three venues

an art exhibition in our gallery

a series of live music and spoken word performances that we refer to as 'hotspots'

a slice of theatre

a live storytelling event narrated in comic-book form using screen projections

some deep attention to crime writing, Latin American short stories, rock 'n' roll dreaming, ways of using art to communicate with the dead, reflections on illness and anxiety, good guys and bad guys in literature, the glow of poetry from Afghanistan + an instruction kit on how to not freak out about the future

At ARWF2026 words come to you alive, deep, different – electric and exploring all of the day.

All profits go to Addi Road's food relief programs and community work.

Addi Road is a community organisation engaged with humanitarian and human rights work across a spectrum of activities from food relief to arts and culture events like this festival. Thanks for any support you can give and please let your friends know about this year's Festival by sharing the news.

Our program for Addi Road Writers' Festival 2026 – with panel details and participants – is available below. A few last magic touches to come, so please return here and scroll down for updates. Well worth your study time in today's culture storm!

LOCATION

Addi Road Community Centre, 142 Addison Rd Marrickville

The festival takes place across our Gumbramorra Hall, the StirrUp Gallery, and the Greek Theatre.

Parking on site.

Public transport – 428 bus direct from Newtown Station with drop-off immediately out front of our main gates.

ADDI ROAD WRITERS' FESTIVAL 2026

★ panels, venues and times at a glance ★

GUMBRAMORRA HALL (GH) 🏛️

11.00am – Doors open. Acknowledgement of Country. Speeches by Addi Road CEO Rosanna Barbero and ARWF2026 Artistic Director Mark Mordue

11.45am – Afterlife Animals | Art, Spirit and Loss: Judith Nangala Crispin, Vaughn Upward Garcia and Helen Franzman with Sarah Runcie (ends 12.45pm)

12.45pm – Hotspot: Helen Franzmann (ends 1.00pm)

1.15pm – Hotspot: Rox Lavi (ends 1.25pm)

1.30pm – Dream Songs | Music for An Imagined Life – Ethan Eshuys, Rox Lavi and AJ Stanton with Kathy McCabe (ends 2pm)

2.15pm – Attacking Anxiety | Writing Past Masks of ‘Normality’ – Dr Sonya Voumard and Kim Kelly with Dr Michelle Hamadache (ends 3.00pm)

3.15pm – Hotspot: Vaughn Upward Garcia (ends 3.25)

3.45pm – Mind Net | Imagining the Future – Professor Jon Cattapan, Ann Dombroski and Professor Chris Danta with Dr Chris Fleming (ends 4.30pm)

4.40 pm – Hotspot: AJ Stanton (ends 4.50pm)

5.10 pm – Dorr-e Dari Artistic Group | A Journey in Theatre and Poetry Between Kabul, Tehran and Sydney's Merrylands in a hybrid performance and discussion with Sheila Ngoc Pham (ends 6.00pm)

= Scribe: Gavin Blake (live illustration on projector) 🏛️

= MC: Kween G 🏛️

GREEK THEATRE (GT) 🏟️

11.30am – Doors open

12.00pm – Crime Scene Australia 1+2 – Philip McLaren and Sam Elliott with Sally Breen (two-part session / ends 12.50pm)

1.15pm – Southern Connections | Latin American Literature Seen from Here – Yumna Kassab, Rosario Lázaro Igoa and Chris Andrews (ends 2.00pm)

2.30pm – Hot Spot: Ethan Eshuys

2.40pm – Are the Boys Alright? | Men’s Interior Life in Books Today – Dr George Haddad, Jet Williams and Luke Carman (ends 3.30pm)

4.00pm – Read To Me | Live Visual Storytelling and the Australian Comics Landscape – Fionn McCabe, Evie Hilliar and Gabe Clark (ends 4.50pm)

STIRRUP GALLEY (SG) 🖼

Exhibition 'my first forest of words' by Kit Kelen

Launch of six books in the Flying Islands Pocket Poets series

Scroll down to bottom for full details and times for this mini-festival of books and poetry happening across the entire afternoon within our larger festival

🫳🏼 ARWF2026 PROGRAM IN FULL

Afterlife Animals | Art, Spirit and Loss (GH, 11.45am) 🏛️

The relationship between art and grief has a long and complex history. How do we communicate our feelings of loss? Can we make it into something meaningful, perhaps even uplifting or spiritual in some way? Join us as three storytellers explore the ways that poetry, photography and music have opened up communications with the visible and invisible worlds around them and what this means to their creative process today.

Judith Nangala Crispin acclaimed poet, visual artist, motorcyclist and volunteer firefighter. Her latest book is The Dingo’s Noctuary, an illustrated verse novel that makes use of lumachrome glass prints, “afterlife portraits of animals and birds, placed on emulsion and developed in natural light. They are not paintings, they’re light-pictures, made of sunlight and decomposition chemistry.”
Vaughn Upward Garcia Peruvian-Australian poet. In 2023, Vaughn won the prestigious Bankstown Poetry Slam ‘Grand Slam’ before publishing his debut collection Poems from the Afterlife.
Helen Franzmann Australian songwriter, singer and musician. Franzmann has released three acclaimed albums under the moniker McKisko. She was awarded the Grant McLennan Fellowship for excellence in songwriting and continues a rich collaboration with The Dirty Three's Mick Turner in their band Mess Esque.
Moderator Sarah Runcie former CEO of the Brisbane Writers Festival

Crime Scene Australia | Dossier #1 : Focus on Philip McLaren (GT, 12 midday) 🏟️

Crime Scene Australia is a two-part session. We open with a focus on the life and writing of Philip McLaren. McLaren was born in the family home at Redfern, NSW, one of seven children. He's a Kamilaroi man. Both his parents are Kamilaroi from Coonabarabran in the Warrumbungle Mountain region of NSW. As far back as he can remember he has always been an artist and a storyteller. He is the winner of the David Unaipon Award for his debut novel in 1993, Sweet Water – Stolen Land (‘the historical settlement of Australia was not a peaceful thing”). His second novel Scream Black Murder was shortlisted for a Ned Kelly Crime Writers’ Award in 1995: “I chose to write crime fiction because it is a popular genre. I wanted my indigenous characters to portray real blackfella life in Australia, and to address the fact that indigenous murders were not being investigated properly… they were filed at the back of the bottom drawer.” McLaren has continued working in the crime writing genre, exploring everything from hardboiled and mystery to police procedurals and the legal thriller.

Please join us for an in-depth conversation with Philip McLaren about crime writing, life, politics, identity and art.

Crime Scene Australia | Dossier #2 : Focus on Sam Elliott (GT, 12 midday) 🏟️

Samuel Elliott is an author and interviewer. He is the founder of The Write Way podcast - a program that has given a platform to established and emerging literary and creative voices. Haze is his debut novel and is soon to be followed by a sequel, Deepfake. In Haze, a female police officer is tasked with assisting the evacuation of properties during a major bushfire. She stumbles over a double murder and a missing child. As the raging fires threaten her coastal hometown, she is pushed and pulled between local developers and a strange cult group called The People’s Cleansing Light who have established themselves in the community. Elliott’s page-turner sits within the rural noir genre, its environmentally-concerned backdrop merging with interest in Australia’s cult-like extremes and female heroine in a regional setting.

★ Crime Scene Australia is a two-part conversation moderated by the writer, editor and academic Sally Breen. She is a regular contributor to The Conversation and the Executive Director of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators. Sally is currently at work on her third book, a non-fiction work based on extensive interviews and research with police in Queensland entitled The Cop Shop: Detectives Real and Imagined. ★

Southern Connections | Latin American Literature Seen From Here (GT, 1.15pm) 🏟️

Since the Boom of the 1960s, Latin American literature has been a stimulating influence on English language writing. But things have changed since the heyday of Gabriel García Márquez. How? Who are the new leading figures? What new currents have emerged? How does the international book trade filter our access to what is written south of the Río Grande? What does contemporary Latin American literature have to offer readers and writers in Australia, specifically? What alternatives to straightforward realism does it propose? Why are short stories a major genre there but a minor one here? What exactly is a crónica? Where can you find this stuff? Join writer and former Parramatta Laureate in Literature Yumna Kassab, Uruguayan-Australian writer and translator Rosario Lázaro Igoa, and translator Chris Andrews to explore the diverse and dynamic world of new Latin American writing.

Yumna Kassab novelist; author The House of Youssef, Australiana, The Lovers, Politica, The Theory of Everything and Goodbye, My Love. Inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature (2023).
Rosario Lázaro Igoa writer, literary translator, translation studies scholar; her short story collection Cráteres artificiales (2021) won the National Literature Prize in Uruguay.
Moderator and participant Chris Andrews is a poet and essayist; he has won the Valle-Inclán Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for his translations. His most recent work is the poetry collection The Oblong Plot.

Dream Songs | Music for an Imagined Life (GH, 1.30pm) 🏛️

Ethan Eshuys, Rox Lavi and AJ Stanton are all in their early twenties. Over the last few years each of them has been making an impression with their music and lyrics. They talk about the songs and artists they love and what it means to them as a source of inspiration for their own art and the way they picture their lives and who they'd like to be. How do experiences as varied as surfing, walking the streets of Armidale and listening to an old David Bowie album affect each of them, driving how they express themselves and the ways they interpret the world around them? A panel conversation on art, music and life as a dreaming space for young people today and the visions they have for tomorrow.

Ethan Eshuys singer and songwriter for indie-rock group Bird in Hand
Rox Lavi r'n'b hip hop artist; recently signed to Sticky Fingers' record label Westway Collective
AJ Stanton indie-pop singer; newest member of psych-rock Sydney band Large Mirage

Moderator Kathy McCabe is the National Music Writer for News Corp. She has been telling the stories of songwriters and musicians, their albums and songs and gigs for over 30 years. She published her first book Rock Gods this year.

Attacking Anxiety | Writing Past Masks of ‘Normality’ (GH, 2.15pm) 🏛️

Anxiety can be crippling, maddening, sad and failure-inducing. It can also be crazy, fun and beautiful at times. Most people suffer at some point from this highly prevalent mental condition. For a smaller number of us, anxiety rarely goes away. It challenges our mental stability, our ability to feel happy, and sometimes even our very existence. Many anxiety sufferers spend years covering up their condition from friends, employers and loved ones, leading to what can be a tortured double life. There is also an undeniable beauty to anxiety arising from the deep understanding of vulnerability that it brings. Knowing and accepting vulnerability is key to understanding our own humanity and that of others. But in the fast, harsh world of strangers and disconnection the masking anxious people do to avoid judgement is intense. There is constant pressure to appear competent, ‘normal’, the opposite to unhinged. Opening up about anxiety can enable connection, or reconnection, with others. It can help us believe we’re all in this together – in a world that seems bent on tearing us apart. This discussion with two anxious writers invites you all to bring your anxious selves along and take part in a candid, provocative, and, we hope, healing session.

Dr Sonya Voumard nonfiction writer and former political journalist with The Age and SMH. Her book Tremor, about living with a rare movement disorder, won Finlay Lloyd’s 20/40 publishing prize in 2024.
Kim Kelly novelist and non-fiction writer. Her first book of creative nonfiction, Touched, won Finlay Lloyd’s 20/40 publishing prize for nonfiction in 2025.
Moderator Dr Michelle Hamadache is a Creative Writing teacher at Macquarie University.

Are the Boys Alright? | Men’s Interior Life in Books Today (GT, 2.40pm) 🏟️

When the novel Flesh won the 2025 Booker Prize it ignited conversations about ‘the strange return of masculine interiority’ to literary publishing. But what does such rarified analysis really mean when a book might just be a one-off phenomenon? What does it mean locally? Are men/boys reading? Are their lives anywhere in the pages of our novels? What are the limits on how we represent men’s experiences in the present publishing moment with all its censoriousness and moralising can’t? Is the disengagement with fiction by male readers a matter of absence, unable to see their lives represented in ways that are believable and complex and true?

Dr George Haddad award-winning writer and artist; lecturer at the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University. His novel Losing Face, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award.
Jet Williams writer and multidisciplinary practitioner. After travelling the world he landed back at home with his parents, broke, in debt, and newly single. Early one morning and unable to sleep, he opened the Notes app on his iPhone and wrote the first lines from his bed for what became his debut novel Off the Rails.
Moderator and participant Luke Carman award-winning novelist and essayist, author of An Elegant Young Man (winner of the 2014 NSW Premier’s New Writing Award), Intimate Antipathies and An Ordinary Ecstasy. In 2025 he was appointed the Judy Harris Writer-in-Residence Fellow at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre

Mind Net | Imagining the Future (GH, 3.45pm) 🏛️

Where are we headed? If the present era is any indication, nowhere good. But the future is not just a matter of fears and premonitions, it is imagined and created concurrent with technology. How do novels, art and music answer this? What are the links between AI, online life and creative possibilities? Is there cause for optimism as we evolve with powerful new machines to meet our ecological challenges? Or are we being remade in an algorithmic reflection, turned into intellectually and spiritually degraded bio-bots farmed into market tribes to serve the interests of the billionaire tech-bros who are meanwhile reaching for their trans-human immortality. Can telling stories save us from such futureshock scenarios and totalitarian implications? Or are we evolving in ways that can’t be stopped, caught in a machine we can’t turn off?

Professor Jon Cattapan arts practice spans drawing, painting, and installation; exploring systems of control, mapping, surveillance, and the fragile intersection between the personal and the political
Ann Dombroski debut novel, After the Great Storm, is set fifty years in the future in Sydney
Chris Danta professor of literature in the School of Cybernetics at Australian National University; his research operates at intersection of literary theory, philosophy, science and theology
Moderator Dr Chris Fleming is the author or editor of ten books, including On Drugs (Giramondo), an Australian Book Review Book of the Year. His work moves between philosophy, memoir, criticism, and other literary forms, and appears in both scholarly and popular publications. He is Associate Professor in Humanities at Western Sydney University.

Stories in Performance

Addi Road Writers’ Festival incorporates the art of performance into its storytelling and writerly reflections. We try to make space for a living and breathing artistry that is coming from the fringes or operating outside of conventions, approaches that involve hybrid forms and new-old ways of communicating. Our program this year previews a few groups doing very special things in Sydney today...

Read to Me | Live Visual Storytelling and the Australian Comics Landscape (GT, 4.00pm) 🏟️

Discover the growing Australian comics scene through the work of three Sydney based cartoonists. These stories, diving into family dynamics, complicated love, climate change and the natural world, are told live by the author and accompanied by projected imagery. After the story presentations, cartoonists discuss some of the unique storytelling techniques and literary merits of the medium, and the changing comics landscape.

Fionn McCabe artist, printmaker, award-winning cartoonist and comics educator
Evie Hilliar animator, cartoonist and jack-of-all-trades artist
Gabe Clark visual communication design practitioner and academic

Dorr-e Dari Artistic Group | A Journey in Theatre and Poetry Between Kabul, Tehran and Sydney's Merrylands (GH, 5.00pm) 🏛️

Dorr-e Dari Artistic Group is a joyful collective of young creators from Afghanistan who bring stories to life through theatre, poetry, music, and thoughtful conversations. Blending Dari and English, tradition and innovation, their work invites people into shared spaces of art, culture, and connection in this hybrid performance and panel discussion.

Kobra Sayyadi is a Hazara-Afghan theatre-maker, writer, and interdisciplinary artist blending theatre, poetry, film, and audio. Her work explores feeling, belonging, and the spaces in between.

Zeynab Noori is an Afghan Hazara actor, born and raised in Iran, whose cross-cultural upbringing informs her artistic voice and perspective.

Jawad runs a plastering business, providing his services on construction sites all over Sydney. He was a member of ensemble PYT Fairfield for three years and made his debut as a performer at Griffin Theatre in the premiere production of PYT’s Tribunal.

Mahdi Mohammadi trained as a theatre director at Kabul University, where he co-founded Papyrus Theatre. Under his leadership, the company was awarded First Prize at the Afghan National Theatre Festival and toured internationally to India and Sweden.

Moderator Sheila Ngoc Pham is a writer, editor, producer, curator and researcher. Sheila previously co-directed the Addi Road Writers' Festival (2021-2023), and her other curation work includes an exhibition of Đông Hồ paintings (2019) for the State Library of NSW, and most recently, MÌNH (2023) for Fairfield City Museum and Gallery. She is the 2025 Imago Fellow at the State Library of NSW.

Performance Hotspots

Every year Addi Road Writers’ Festival offers ten-minute ‘hotspots’ to musicians, spoken word artists, animators, speakers and performers. It’s another way of expanding what we think of as writing and storytelling. It also energises the festival beyond talks and panels, making way for intense, concise and inspiring showcases that seize the day and change its rhythm. Here are the Hotspots for ARWF2026...

Music / Helen Franzmann is an Australian songwriter, singer and musician. One of six children raised on a Queensland farm, she played piano and sang from an early age. Franzmann sang classically until her early twenties, moving to London where exposure to alternative music and touring acts like the American post-rock band Low changed her direction. She was awarded the Grant McLennan Memorial Fellowship for song writing in 2009 which took her to Berlin. Franzmann has since released three acclaimed solo albums under the moniker McKisko: Glorio (2009), Eximo (2014) and Southerly (2019). In 2020, she formed Mess Esque with Dirty Three legend Mick Turner on guitar. They released their first album Dream#12 in 2020. It was followed by a self-titled second album in 2021 just after Covid lockdowns, blending advanced and lo-fi technology to assist their long-distance collaboration. Their 2025 third album, Jay Marie, Comfort Me, was deeply affected by the death of Franzmann’s sister and notes made from a dream diary at the time. Helen Franzmann will perform a short solo set. (GH, 12.45pm) 🏛️

Music / Rox Lavi is a 22 year old Gomeroi man. Ipswich born ‘n' raised. Mum used to sing around the house, I liked that. We were pretty poor. Whenever our power cut mum used to say it was a black out. Lol. I was always writing poems, usually for girls I liked. Found a flow that way pretty fast I reckon.. Makin’ them feel good made me feel better. Nothings really changed in the way I approach music. Rap raised me, most my words have been written in that vein. At the moment I’m enjoying putting my words through an early 2000’s indie rock lense. Challenging me to find melody alongside me rhythm. I never wanna be put in a box. Music is music. End of the day it’s all just bla bla in the bla... (GH, 1.15pm) 🏛️

Music / Ethan Eshuys is a singer-songwriter from Sydney and part of the five-piece pop-rock band Bird in Hand. He writes with a focus on honesty and observation, drawing from everyday moments, relationships, and the quiet shifts of early adulthood. His work is shaped by a long-standing interest in storytelling, capturing the rhythm of real thought and conversation. With Bird in Hand, this lyrical approach is set against jangling guitars and propulsive rhythms, creating songs that feel immediate and grounded. Across both his solo and band work, his writing is driven by the idea that within the particular, something universal can be found. (GT,2.30pm) 🏟️

Spoken Word / Vaughn Upward Garcia is a Peruvian-Australian poet from Queanbeyan, New South Wales. His work explores classism, mortality, diaspora, and the liminal spaces between the living and the dead, blending lyric intensity with narrative depth. In 2023, Vaughn won the prestigious Bankstown Poetry Slam ‘Grand Slam’ marking him as a distinctive voice within Australia’s contemporary spoken word and literary poetry scenes. In 2024, he published his debut collection, Poems from the Afterlife, followed by a national book launch tour across Australia. In 2025, Vaughn expanded his international presence, performing at Stories on Sunset Boulevard and North Figueroa Bookshop in Los Angeles. His practice bridges page and stage, drawing on oral tradition, personal history, and cultural inheritance to create work that is both intimate and expansive. (GH, 3.15pm) 🏛️

Music / AJ Stanton is a singer-songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist from Sydney who blends blues, jazz, folk, and indie rock. Being a poet at heart, AJ has been described as “mature with a grain of madness”, credit due to her unapologetically quirky and honest songwriting and lyricism. AJ has performed as both a solo artist and with her band at various venues and events across Sydney including King Street Crawl, Lazybones, Ferragosto Festival, the Red Rattler and Summer Hill Festival. (GH, 4.50pm) 🏛️

Scribe | Gavin Blake (GH, all day – one man, one pen, one projector, and a desire to really DRAW) 🏛️

Gavin Blake has spent the last 26 years listening to conversations in boardrooms, workshops, conference halls, and yarning circles. He draws while people talk. His work is used to connect people to spoken word content. It helps engage visual thinkers.

His images illuminate themes and capture personalities, enhancing insights and key moments in a conversation. They can be used as a prop for the experience or to contribute to posts on social media. All his work is done in real time with no preparation. He just relies on listening to the spoken word – and the ability to draw quickly.

Gavin has been with the Addi Road Writers’ Festival for the last two events. His visuals will be displayed on the walls of our Gumbramorra Hall this year during breaks. You are encouraged to photograph and share his work in any manner you like. Just watching Gavin do his thing is an experience all its own.

MC | Kween G (GH and GT) 🏛️🏟️

Kween G (Kibone) is a dynamic cultural leader, hip hop artist, voice-over artist, MC, broadcaster, and curator, a bold and essential voice in Australian music and performance. With roots in community and culture, she has forged a powerful creative legacy as a performer, mentor, and advocate for empowerment through art. A founding member of the pioneering hip hop duo KillaQueenz, Kween G first made her mark as a fearless lyricist whose commanding flow and conscious storytelling broke new ground in Australian hip hop. Today, she continues to evolve as a solo artist and cultural force, using her platform to champion diversity, artistic excellence, and social change.

Kit Kelen Art Exhibition 🖼

at the Stirrup Gallery from Monday 11th May to Sunday 17th May

to be opened by Brook Emery on Saturday 16th May at noon as part of Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2026

Kit Kelen’s my first forest of words is an immersive installation experiment in encounters between image and text. These works on paper are all about crossing and blurring lines between text and image, between what is intelligible as script in one language or another, and what might be prototypical of writing. The reader/viewer/listener of this exhibition is led along from known words to semblances of words, to symbols, into scrawl that can never quite be meaningless. Along with the paper work on the wall are a slideshow, and soundscapes, these also distracting and de/familiarizing the viewer/listener’s expectations of presence to image and text.

Flying Islands Pocket Poets Book Launches 🖼

Kit Kelen is the Series Editor for Flying Islands' Pocket Poets. In association with his exhibition, the publishing house will be launching seven new titles.

These launches will involve talks and readings all afternoon on Saturday 16 May inside the Stirrup Gallery: a mini-festival of independent publishing and new poetry within Addi Road Writers' Festival 2026.

1 pm – Paris Rosemont launches Damien Becker’s Thin Reed Throat

1.30 pm – Sophie Loy-Wilson launches Josh Stenberg and Lam Lam’s The Travelling Soul

2 pm – Nadia Wheatley launches Gillian Rubinstein’s Screaming and Euphoria

2.30 pm – Mark Mahemoff launches Ronald Atilano’s New Ordinance for the Dead

3.30 pm – Mark Mordue launches D.G.Lloyd’s Still Alive in Dubbo

4 pm – Chris Mansell launches Dael Allison’s Blimmin’ Wimmin

4.30 pm – Peter Boyle launches Kit Kelen’s Food of Love: Concert Pieces followed by a reading from Kit accompanied by Paul Searles on the keyboard

Descriptions of all books and author bios at https://flyingislandspocketpoets.com.au/

We are grateful to our ARWF2026 supporters...

Contact the host of Addi Road Writers’ Festival 2026