Thousands flock to city’s literary festival

MORE than 8000 people delved into some of society’s important topics with renowned authors at Geelong’s Word for Word festival at the weekend.

The three-day event at the Geelong Library and Heritage Centre is Australia’s only nonfiction writing festival and featured 76 presenters including Gillian Trigg, Clementine Ford and Helen Garner.

Festival director Maryanne Vagg said the event was a brilliant success and drew more than 3500 people on the Saturday.

“We’re a little bit shellshocked and we’ve had such beautiful comments from people about the festival,” she said. “The buzz around the library has been so positive.

“We had some fantastic authors and it’s really come into its own this year.”

The festival included author’s discussions on a range of issues including the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, history, racism, indigenous issues, asylum seekers, social research, true crime and artificial intelligence.

Ms Vagg said the literary festival highlighted people’s desire to discuss important topics.

“In an age where there’s a blurred line between real and not real and people are hungry to talk about issues, and some of our best attended sessions were about the hardest-hitting topics,” she said.

“It’s really getting conversations out in the open that you might normally have around the water cooler.”

Ms Vagg said the festival had increased in size and popularity each year since it began five years ago, and had become an iconic Geelong event.

“It feels like a really Geelong production because we had over 40 volunteers for the weekend and there’s been a great collaboration with Deakin,” she said. “There’s been people who’ve come down from Melbourne and said there’s nothing like this anywhere else and they’ll be back again next year.”