Book Stack :: Sydney Writers Festival 2021

For a few years now the Sydney Writers Festival – or more specifically, the All Day YA event held as part of the festival – has been the highlight of my literary calendar. Yesterday marked two weeks until this year’s All Day YA (hopefully! We are super lucky to be in a situation where we don’t currently have community spread of Covid, so it is safe to hold these events. There is info on the SWF website about steps/regulations they have in place to ensure their events are held in a way that is safe. If anything changes in the next two weeks the event could be cancelled.) so I thought I’d pull out some books by authors I’ll be seeing at the event to share in a stack tonight.

You can see the program for the All Day YA day on the SWF website here. Obviously last year’s event was cancelled, which has made me even more excited about this year’s! There are a lot of things to love about the way the YA day is done – things that I think other festivals could learn from if they are serious about having a program of YA events, which they should be (hi Canberra, I’m looking at you!). I love that there are a bunch of events on the same day at the same venue, and the tickets are relatively inexpensive at $10 per hour long session (with no minimum requirement). Obviously things might be different this year because of COVID, but in past years I’ve been super impressed with how accessible authors make themselves to readers between sessions. I also think the level of involvement of actual young people in curating the program and moderating at sessions is brilliant. You can check out my wrap up posts where I rave about previous years’ All Day YA events here (just click on the year) – 2017 2018 2019.

You can see the full list of authors who will be attending the event on the program pages, linked above – these are just some of their books that I have my hands on already and have either read or have on my tbr shelf for now. Click the titles to go to the relevant Goodreads pages.

• The Gaps by Leanne Hall
• Metal Fish, Falling Snow by Cath Moore
• The Dark Tide by Alice Jasinska
• You Were Made for Me by Jenna Guillaume (my review is here)
• Waking Romeo by Kathryn Bryant (my review is here)
• The Lost Souls Atlas by Zana Fraillon
• Rebel Gods by Will Kostakis
• The F Team by Rawah Arja
• The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix

Let me know if you’ve read and loved any of these already! Do you have a favourite YA author you’d love to see at an event (either in person, or at a virtual event)?

xo Bron