00:00:54
S1: On Vision Australia Radio. Welcome to our conversations with emerging and experienced creative voices in our community. On air now and also available on Vision Australia Radio Podcasts. I'm Kate Cooper and this week and next on Emerging Writers, we're focusing on the 2026 Totally Lit Adventures in the Port City Festival, being held in Fremantle from the 2nd to the 16th of October. On this week's program, we'll hear from Sharon Flindell, curator and producer of the festival, who is speaking to us from Western Australia. The festival imagines new and original ways to connect live literature and storytelling to place culture, history, and community so that audiences can go to different venues, listen to and engage directly with writers writing and storytelling. Welcome to the program, Sharon, and thank you for making the time to speak with us today on emerging writers. You've worked across cultural industries both in Australia and internationally for 40 years. What first drew you to work in this area and what qualifications or motivation did you need?
00:02:18
S2: First of all, Kate, thanks very much for having me on the program today. I really appreciate your time. I started in the cultural industries as a teenager, actually here in Perth. We have a secondary school called John Curtin College of the Arts. And that school provides a special course in various aspects of the performing arts. So I was an early intake to that program. I was one of the students in the first couple of years of that program being established, which really is, I guess, where I developed my initial interest in being involved in the arts. But I very quickly realized that my talents didn't lie in singing or dancing or acting, and that I had much more of a natural inclination towards curating and producing and organizing events. So that's really where it all started, and it's just basically gone on from there.
00:03:14
S1: That's terrific. As London based independent producer some years ago, you conceived, curated and produced Hulme. Verdict? Not sure if I've said that correctly.
00:03:27
S2: No, that was that was great.
00:03:29
S1: Hungary's first international contemporary arts festival in the post-Communist era. Would you tell us how that came about and what you learned from that experience?
00:03:41
S2: So I, I moved to London in my early 20s, and after a few years of working with different arts organisations like the Institute of Contemporary Arts, I established my own independent office, if you like. And I was doing a range of different projects representing different artists who were touring, bringing work into the UK, you know, curating events, organising festivals, that type of thing. And I was working with a really brilliant group called Ralph Ralph, who are actually two brothers who had a performance work called The Summit, which was hugely popular all over the world. And we, we toured that particular work throughout Europe and to America and South America and even Africa and Australia. And one year we were invited to take that work to Budapest. And we were there as the guests of the Hungarian Social Democrats, which was really interesting. We did the performance. I think it was just a couple of months after the Berlin Wall had come down. So it was a very dynamic period of time in Central Europe and in Hungary in particular. And that was my first visit to Hungary, and I was just really engaged with the culture and the people and the passion. That was really evident amongst the people for performance, for poetry, for music. It was a really lively sort of environment. But what I noticed was that they had been quite isolated as a result of, you know, that Communist period, and there was a real appetite for experiencing more contemporary work. So that was the that was the trigger for creating the language, which in English translates to making waves, which is what I think we did. And so I took a lot of work, contemporary work across art forms to Budapest and learned a lot and learned a little bit of the Hungarian language, learned how to create a festival in a country that had no convertible currency and just had a really brilliant time. So yeah, I have fond memories, even though it was many, many years ago.
00:06:01
S1: That sounds like the most extraordinary experience. Sharon, you were CEO of writing W a for more than 17 years, from 2005 to 2022. In that time, you were responsible for a number of literary festivals and partnerships, including the inaugural Disrupted Festival of Ideas in 2014 with the State Library of Western Australia. Kembali Perth in 2020 and the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, Perth in 2021 and In 2022. Both partnership events with the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali. The Quantum Words Perth Festival of Science writing in 2019 and 2022. With writing New South Wales and the Words on Water Festival in Mandurah in 2019 with the Jaipur Literature Festival. That's a diverse and impressive range of high profile festivals, plus some international partnerships. How do these festivals and partnerships come about and what for you, are the most rewarding aspects of producing and curating festivals in partnership with other cultural organisations?
00:07:18
S2: My role with running WA was very much about creating opportunity for West Australian writers and publishers, promoting their work, creating avenues to connect that work with readers wherever they may be, and the festival program that I created over those years started from that point of wanting to create new opportunities for West Australian writers. Partnering with international organisations like Writers Festival and the Jaipur Festival were a great honour and also a great opportunity to expand the reach of what we were aiming to do and to collaborate with some incredible festival curators and producers in those countries. So really what we were doing, I guess, is, is adding value by building those relationships and reaching into new communities and new networks. The partnership with Abbott came about because Janette Deneef and I had been liaising over a number of years around different events and activities, and runway had been supporting West Australian writers to visit Bali and participate in Janet's festival, and after a few years, that just evolved into the idea of bringing all Writers Festival to Perth as a means to enabling West Australian audiences who might not have otherwise been able to visit Bali, to have an experience at that festival in their own backyard. So we started with Kembali, which was just a small program that we put together actually during the Covid years. So that was interesting because we were working with Indonesian writers in Indonesia, and we had our authors on stage here in Perth, and we connected them all online so that we had an interactive experience for the writers and for the audiences in both locations who obviously weren't able to travel at that particular time, and then it evolved from there. It went on from there into a series of bigger festivals on an annual basis, where we were able to bring Indonesian writers and other authors that were appearing in the festival here to WA and put them on stage with some, you know, absolutely incredible West Australian writers. So it was a real pleasure and, as I said, an honour to be partnering with a festival as prestigious as Orbit Writers Festival. And equally, when we were able to partner with Jaipur Festival, that was another development where we created a festival in Mandurah, fully curated by the Jaipur Festival team. And it was a stunning success. It was. It was terrific.
00:10:23
S1: That must be so rewarding then, to create those incredible opportunities for writers, both here and writers from overseas, with whom we do have connections being geographically located where we are in Australia.
00:10:39
S2: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think, you know, one of the joys of doing those festivals was that opportunity to make those connections and build those relationships, which were incredibly important to the ethos of those festivals.
00:10:55
S1: Sharon, you now work as an independent producer and the principal of Sharon Flindell Australia, where your recent projects include Jalan Jalan Indonesia, a multi-arts program developed in collaboration with the Indonesian consulate in Perth. We mentioned just before about your partnership events with the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali. Would you talk with us more about what inspires your connection with Indonesian culture in particular?
00:11:26
S2: Well, again, it really it's really grown out of that connection with Janet Tinney from the Writers Festival. So my first visit to Indonesia was actually to that festival. And having attended that, that festival in whatever year it was, I came back to Perth and decided actually the visit had been too short and I really needed to go and have, you know, a much longer experience of, of Indonesia and Bali in particular. So within about two weeks, I very quickly turned around and went back again. And the relationships just evolved from there. So through working with Janet and making connections with other local Indonesian arts organisations, you know, the obvious next step was to try to bring some of that Indonesian work, not just literary work, but cross art form work back to Perth and share that with audiences here. So that's, I guess, how Indonesia came about, working with the Indonesian consulate to put that spotlight on Indonesian culture more broadly.
00:12:38
S1: That's brilliant work, making those cultural connections happen for such a broad range of people as well. Sharon, we're speaking today because you're the curator and producer of the 2026 Totally Lit Adventures in the Port City Festival, being held from the 2nd to the 16th of October across Fremantle. How long has the festival been going and how did it originally come about?
00:13:06
S2: Well, we're just about to launch the second festival, and this year's program is a two week program from the 2nd to the 16th of October, with more than 60 events taking place across Fremantle. This, as I said, is the second festival we launched last year, and because of the success of that inaugural festival, we've been able to return with a slightly bigger program than we had last year. Last year's program was was pretty huge. This one is huge. The inspiration really. I guess the light bulb moment that I had came a few years ago, where I was attending a literary event in Fremantle, and that event had been organised by Fremantle based writing organisation. There was a Fremantle based independent bookshop selling books. We had a Fremantle based publisher very present in that day's program, and the writers that Fremantle Press publish were very much a part of that day. I just looked around the room and realised how significant literary culture is in Fremantle and how strongly it's supported with a huge cohort of local writers, but also obviously a really strong community of readers. And that got me thinking about Fremantle as a place of stories and as a city of literature. And that was really the initial starting point and concept. And then I began having conversations with colleagues in Fremantle who work in the writing sector, and proposed this idea of a festival that celebrated Fremantle as this place of stories and books and writing. And the idea was, you know, very enthusiastically received. And so onwards we went.
00:15:16
S3: Never had nothing. Nobody like you.
00:15:22
S1: On Vision Australia Radio. You're listening to our conversation program, Emerging Writers Today, featuring Sharon Flindell, curator and producer of the 2026 Totally Lit Adventures in the Port City Festival, who is speaking to us from Western Australia? Sharon, we mentioned in the introduction about the festival feature titled Crime Time. On Saturday the 10th of October, a full day with a fantastic array of crime writers, including Ruth McIver, who we'll hear from on this program next week. Why is Fremantle the ideal place to have a crime time feature for writers and readers, and what can attendees look forward to on that day?
00:16:10
S2: Uh, well, excellent question Kate. So with the crime time program, what we're doing is just kind of leaning into Fremantle's convict past and connecting it with its very strong crime writing present. So Listeners may already be aware of Fremantle Prison, which sits and looms over the city. Somewhat. The prison was built in the 1800s, mid 1800s by convict labour. And, you know, it is a very imposing structure and has an incredible history. There are loads of stories about the prison and the people that were incarcerated there, both, you know, in the 18th and 19th centuries and more recently in the 1900s. The prison closed around about 2000, and it's been turned into a very popular tourist attraction. So we're able to make use of one of the workshops on the site as a venue for our program of crime writing events. And it's a really, I think, very diverse program of conversations that people can join in. We start the day with the crime scene, which is a panel conversation putting a spotlight on emerging voices in the West Australian crime community. Crime writing community. I should say that session is followed by Crime and Punishment, where we have a panel who are going to share stories of the prison from the 1800s and the Fenian escape. The Catalpa escape, which is a. Is an infamous story here in WA, may not be so well known by the rest of your listeners, but it was a very daring escape where prisoners managed to escape not just the prison, but Australia on a ship that was waiting for them just outside Fremantle Harbour and carried them back to to America. So yeah, that will be a part of the crime and punishment scene. But that conversation will also focus on female prisoners who are incarcerated at the jail and will include David Whish-wilson, who has a more recent contemporary experience of the prison and the stories of people who were held there. Then we move on to a session called Aiding and Abetting, which is really fascinating, where we'll be looking at technology and crime and how that technology can be used to assist criminals as well as law enforcement officers. So yeah, that will include Alan Carter, who is a best selling crime fiction writer, whose next book, which will also be launching in the festival, really delves into that subject of techno crime. And he'll be joined on stage by was Assistant Commissioner of Police Alan Maderazo, whose particular area of expertise is technology and how it can be used for crime prevention. And I think that's going to be a really illuminating conversation, because the technology that is being used is all pervasive and extraordinary in its capabilities. And I think it'll really surprise a lot of lot of people in our audience. Uh, and then we move on to a conversation about murder in the media, where we'll be looking at the relationship between violent crime and the way in which the media reports that crime. And then we end the day with international crimes and their consequences, which will be a conversation featuring Geoffrey Robertson QC, who I think most people will be aware of as a really prominent barrister in the human rights field. And he'll be joined by a panel of specialists and authors who are very active in the human rights area.
00:20:28
S1: That sounds amazing. What a wonderful day.
00:20:33
S2: Yeah, we definitely are intending to record some of these sessions and we'd love to share them with you.
00:20:39
S1: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Sharon. What about some of the other features and highlights of the festival that you can tell us?
00:20:48
S2: Ah, well, so as I said that we've got 60 events and they are incredibly diverse. We've got a treasure hunt through Fremantle where teams can work together to find clues and solve a murder mystery. A very prominent, well-known crime writer has been murdered, and audiences are invited to solve that problem by finding the clues hidden in Fremantle, we've got another trail activity for kids where they can follow a map and collect pieces of a really beautiful artwork that's been created for us by James Foley, who's a fabulous author illustrator of children's books. And so we commissioned James to create this artwork, which is so fun. It's a really beautiful work. And the artwork has been reproduced as a series of magnets. So children can follow that trail and collect the artwork and take it home and put it on their fridge. Uh, we've got private storytelling events on Fremantle Wheel, so children again can have the experience of a private story time with the author of the book joining them in a gondola on the Ferris wheel. So meet the author, hear the book, and experience flying over Fremantle on the on the tour as well. Um, we've also got poetry readings on the wheel at sunset. So if you like your poetry with a beautiful view, then that's an event for you. We are also welcoming Jane Cara, who will be joining us for a couple of events, including a literary lunch where we will be talking to her about her diverse writing career and a whole range of different issues that she's very passionate about, including women's rights and public education. We are also running a program of events at the Maritime Museum that involves a virtual reality exhibition, as well as screenings of films and animated stories. We have a whole program of conversations and panel discussions taking place in various bars and venues throughout the city across the two week period. And we've got book launches, we've got poetry readings. We've got an enormous book market happening in the middle of the festival, where we'll also be presenting songwriters and poets and other performers throughout the day. So that's a great opportunity for audiences to come along and discover a whole range of writers and books that they may not typically come across in their local bookshop. And we're concluding the festival with the announcement of this year's Tag Hungerford Award winner. The Hungerford Award is a very important award in the literary community here in Western Australia, because it is an award for an emerging, unpublished author. And the Hungerford Award has launched the career of many, many West Australian authors. So it's it's a it's a brilliant way for us to wrap up the program by announcing the next West Australian author to be published by Fremantle Press.
00:24:19
S1: It sounds like the most wonderful festival. And if our listeners want to find out more, go to Totallylegit dot a Sharon Vision Australia Radio is proud to be an access and inclusion partner promoting the Totally Lit Festival. Would you tell us what this partnership means to you?
00:24:41
S2: Oh well, it means a lot because as I said earlier, an objective of these festivals is to connect audiences with great storytelling and great books and vision. Australia Radio does such a wonderful job of doing that, that partnering with you is just, you know, such a perfect fit for us and a great way for us to increase our community of readers and audiences.
00:25:13
S1: And it's great for us to hear. On the Emerging Writers program on Vision Australia radio. Sharon, what about after the festival for you? Are you planning a well-earned rest, or will you go straight into a new project?
00:25:28
S2: Oh, no no no no no. My sights are very firmly set on the the end of this festival. That's my horizon, and I. I'm not thinking beyond that, other than, as you said, probably quite a nice long rest.
00:25:45
S1: And again, for our listeners, if you want to find out more about the Totally Lit Festival, go to Totally lit dot a you. Thank you so much, Sharon. It's been fascinating speaking with you about the totally let adventures in the Port City Festival.
00:26:04
S2: Thank you Kate. Appreciate it.
00:26:05
S1: Our guest on Emerging Writers today was literary festival curator and producer Sharon Flindell. Speaking with us from Western Australia on the traditional lands of the Whadjuk Younger people. And next week on Emerging Writers, we'll be bringing you our interview with crime fiction writer Ruth McIver, who is a featured writer at the Crime Time Day on Saturday the 10th of October at the 2026 Totally Lit Adventures in the Port City Festival, being held in Fremantle from the 2nd to the 16th of October. This program is produced in our Adelaide Studios on Naata and can be heard at the same time each week here on Vision Australia Radio. Bay radio on digital. Online via radio.org or find us wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for emerging writers by Vision Australia Radio.
S1: On Vision Australia Radio. Welcome to our conversations with emerging and experienced creative voices in our community. On air now and also available on Vision Australia Radio Podcasts. I'm Kate Cooper and this week and next on Emerging Writers, we're focusing on the 2026 Totally Lit Adventures in the Port City Festival, being held in Fremantle from the 2nd to the 16th of October. On this week's program, we'll hear from Sharon Flindell, curator and producer of the festival, who is speaking to us from Western Australia. The festival imagines new and original ways to connect live literature and storytelling to place culture, history, and community so that audiences can go to different venues, listen to and engage directly with writers writing and storytelling. Welcome to the program, Sharon, and thank you for making the time to speak with us today on emerging writers. You've worked across cultural industries both in Australia and internationally for 40 years. What first drew you to work in this area and what qualifications or motivation did you need?
00:02:18
S2: First of all, Kate, thanks very much for having me on the program today. I really appreciate your time. I started in the cultural industries as a teenager, actually here in Perth. We have a secondary school called John Curtin College of the Arts. And that school provides a special course in various aspects of the performing arts. So I was an early intake to that program. I was one of the students in the first couple of years of that program being established, which really is, I guess, where I developed my initial interest in being involved in the arts. But I very quickly realized that my talents didn't lie in singing or dancing or acting, and that I had much more of a natural inclination towards curating and producing and organizing events. So that's really where it all started, and it's just basically gone on from there.
00:03:14
S1: That's terrific. As London based independent producer some years ago, you conceived, curated and produced Hulme. Verdict? Not sure if I've said that correctly.
00:03:27
S2: No, that was that was great.
00:03:29
S1: Hungary's first international contemporary arts festival in the post-Communist era. Would you tell us how that came about and what you learned from that experience?
00:03:41
S2: So I, I moved to London in my early 20s, and after a few years of working with different arts organisations like the Institute of Contemporary Arts, I established my own independent office, if you like. And I was doing a range of different projects representing different artists who were touring, bringing work into the UK, you know, curating events, organising festivals, that type of thing. And I was working with a really brilliant group called Ralph Ralph, who are actually two brothers who had a performance work called The Summit, which was hugely popular all over the world. And we, we toured that particular work throughout Europe and to America and South America and even Africa and Australia. And one year we were invited to take that work to Budapest. And we were there as the guests of the Hungarian Social Democrats, which was really interesting. We did the performance. I think it was just a couple of months after the Berlin Wall had come down. So it was a very dynamic period of time in Central Europe and in Hungary in particular. And that was my first visit to Hungary, and I was just really engaged with the culture and the people and the passion. That was really evident amongst the people for performance, for poetry, for music. It was a really lively sort of environment. But what I noticed was that they had been quite isolated as a result of, you know, that Communist period, and there was a real appetite for experiencing more contemporary work. So that was the that was the trigger for creating the language, which in English translates to making waves, which is what I think we did. And so I took a lot of work, contemporary work across art forms to Budapest and learned a lot and learned a little bit of the Hungarian language, learned how to create a festival in a country that had no convertible currency and just had a really brilliant time. So yeah, I have fond memories, even though it was many, many years ago.
00:06:01
S1: That sounds like the most extraordinary experience. Sharon, you were CEO of writing W a for more than 17 years, from 2005 to 2022. In that time, you were responsible for a number of literary festivals and partnerships, including the inaugural Disrupted Festival of Ideas in 2014 with the State Library of Western Australia. Kembali Perth in 2020 and the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, Perth in 2021 and In 2022. Both partnership events with the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali. The Quantum Words Perth Festival of Science writing in 2019 and 2022. With writing New South Wales and the Words on Water Festival in Mandurah in 2019 with the Jaipur Literature Festival. That's a diverse and impressive range of high profile festivals, plus some international partnerships. How do these festivals and partnerships come about and what for you, are the most rewarding aspects of producing and curating festivals in partnership with other cultural organisations?
00:07:18
S2: My role with running WA was very much about creating opportunity for West Australian writers and publishers, promoting their work, creating avenues to connect that work with readers wherever they may be, and the festival program that I created over those years started from that point of wanting to create new opportunities for West Australian writers. Partnering with international organisations like Writers Festival and the Jaipur Festival were a great honour and also a great opportunity to expand the reach of what we were aiming to do and to collaborate with some incredible festival curators and producers in those countries. So really what we were doing, I guess, is, is adding value by building those relationships and reaching into new communities and new networks. The partnership with Abbott came about because Janette Deneef and I had been liaising over a number of years around different events and activities, and runway had been supporting West Australian writers to visit Bali and participate in Janet's festival, and after a few years, that just evolved into the idea of bringing all Writers Festival to Perth as a means to enabling West Australian audiences who might not have otherwise been able to visit Bali, to have an experience at that festival in their own backyard. So we started with Kembali, which was just a small program that we put together actually during the Covid years. So that was interesting because we were working with Indonesian writers in Indonesia, and we had our authors on stage here in Perth, and we connected them all online so that we had an interactive experience for the writers and for the audiences in both locations who obviously weren't able to travel at that particular time, and then it evolved from there. It went on from there into a series of bigger festivals on an annual basis, where we were able to bring Indonesian writers and other authors that were appearing in the festival here to WA and put them on stage with some, you know, absolutely incredible West Australian writers. So it was a real pleasure and, as I said, an honour to be partnering with a festival as prestigious as Orbit Writers Festival. And equally, when we were able to partner with Jaipur Festival, that was another development where we created a festival in Mandurah, fully curated by the Jaipur Festival team. And it was a stunning success. It was. It was terrific.
00:10:23
S1: That must be so rewarding then, to create those incredible opportunities for writers, both here and writers from overseas, with whom we do have connections being geographically located where we are in Australia.
00:10:39
S2: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think, you know, one of the joys of doing those festivals was that opportunity to make those connections and build those relationships, which were incredibly important to the ethos of those festivals.
00:10:55
S1: Sharon, you now work as an independent producer and the principal of Sharon Flindell Australia, where your recent projects include Jalan Jalan Indonesia, a multi-arts program developed in collaboration with the Indonesian consulate in Perth. We mentioned just before about your partnership events with the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali. Would you talk with us more about what inspires your connection with Indonesian culture in particular?
00:11:26
S2: Well, again, it really it's really grown out of that connection with Janet Tinney from the Writers Festival. So my first visit to Indonesia was actually to that festival. And having attended that, that festival in whatever year it was, I came back to Perth and decided actually the visit had been too short and I really needed to go and have, you know, a much longer experience of, of Indonesia and Bali in particular. So within about two weeks, I very quickly turned around and went back again. And the relationships just evolved from there. So through working with Janet and making connections with other local Indonesian arts organisations, you know, the obvious next step was to try to bring some of that Indonesian work, not just literary work, but cross art form work back to Perth and share that with audiences here. So that's, I guess, how Indonesia came about, working with the Indonesian consulate to put that spotlight on Indonesian culture more broadly.
00:12:38
S1: That's brilliant work, making those cultural connections happen for such a broad range of people as well. Sharon, we're speaking today because you're the curator and producer of the 2026 Totally Lit Adventures in the Port City Festival, being held from the 2nd to the 16th of October across Fremantle. How long has the festival been going and how did it originally come about?
00:13:06
S2: Well, we're just about to launch the second festival, and this year's program is a two week program from the 2nd to the 16th of October, with more than 60 events taking place across Fremantle. This, as I said, is the second festival we launched last year, and because of the success of that inaugural festival, we've been able to return with a slightly bigger program than we had last year. Last year's program was was pretty huge. This one is huge. The inspiration really. I guess the light bulb moment that I had came a few years ago, where I was attending a literary event in Fremantle, and that event had been organised by Fremantle based writing organisation. There was a Fremantle based independent bookshop selling books. We had a Fremantle based publisher very present in that day's program, and the writers that Fremantle Press publish were very much a part of that day. I just looked around the room and realised how significant literary culture is in Fremantle and how strongly it's supported with a huge cohort of local writers, but also obviously a really strong community of readers. And that got me thinking about Fremantle as a place of stories and as a city of literature. And that was really the initial starting point and concept. And then I began having conversations with colleagues in Fremantle who work in the writing sector, and proposed this idea of a festival that celebrated Fremantle as this place of stories and books and writing. And the idea was, you know, very enthusiastically received. And so onwards we went.
00:15:16
S3: Never had nothing. Nobody like you.
00:15:22
S1: On Vision Australia Radio. You're listening to our conversation program, Emerging Writers Today, featuring Sharon Flindell, curator and producer of the 2026 Totally Lit Adventures in the Port City Festival, who is speaking to us from Western Australia? Sharon, we mentioned in the introduction about the festival feature titled Crime Time. On Saturday the 10th of October, a full day with a fantastic array of crime writers, including Ruth McIver, who we'll hear from on this program next week. Why is Fremantle the ideal place to have a crime time feature for writers and readers, and what can attendees look forward to on that day?
00:16:10
S2: Uh, well, excellent question Kate. So with the crime time program, what we're doing is just kind of leaning into Fremantle's convict past and connecting it with its very strong crime writing present. So Listeners may already be aware of Fremantle Prison, which sits and looms over the city. Somewhat. The prison was built in the 1800s, mid 1800s by convict labour. And, you know, it is a very imposing structure and has an incredible history. There are loads of stories about the prison and the people that were incarcerated there, both, you know, in the 18th and 19th centuries and more recently in the 1900s. The prison closed around about 2000, and it's been turned into a very popular tourist attraction. So we're able to make use of one of the workshops on the site as a venue for our program of crime writing events. And it's a really, I think, very diverse program of conversations that people can join in. We start the day with the crime scene, which is a panel conversation putting a spotlight on emerging voices in the West Australian crime community. Crime writing community. I should say that session is followed by Crime and Punishment, where we have a panel who are going to share stories of the prison from the 1800s and the Fenian escape. The Catalpa escape, which is a. Is an infamous story here in WA, may not be so well known by the rest of your listeners, but it was a very daring escape where prisoners managed to escape not just the prison, but Australia on a ship that was waiting for them just outside Fremantle Harbour and carried them back to to America. So yeah, that will be a part of the crime and punishment scene. But that conversation will also focus on female prisoners who are incarcerated at the jail and will include David Whish-wilson, who has a more recent contemporary experience of the prison and the stories of people who were held there. Then we move on to a session called Aiding and Abetting, which is really fascinating, where we'll be looking at technology and crime and how that technology can be used to assist criminals as well as law enforcement officers. So yeah, that will include Alan Carter, who is a best selling crime fiction writer, whose next book, which will also be launching in the festival, really delves into that subject of techno crime. And he'll be joined on stage by was Assistant Commissioner of Police Alan Maderazo, whose particular area of expertise is technology and how it can be used for crime prevention. And I think that's going to be a really illuminating conversation, because the technology that is being used is all pervasive and extraordinary in its capabilities. And I think it'll really surprise a lot of lot of people in our audience. Uh, and then we move on to a conversation about murder in the media, where we'll be looking at the relationship between violent crime and the way in which the media reports that crime. And then we end the day with international crimes and their consequences, which will be a conversation featuring Geoffrey Robertson QC, who I think most people will be aware of as a really prominent barrister in the human rights field. And he'll be joined by a panel of specialists and authors who are very active in the human rights area.
00:20:28
S1: That sounds amazing. What a wonderful day.
00:20:33
S2: Yeah, we definitely are intending to record some of these sessions and we'd love to share them with you.
00:20:39
S1: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Sharon. What about some of the other features and highlights of the festival that you can tell us?
00:20:48
S2: Ah, well, so as I said that we've got 60 events and they are incredibly diverse. We've got a treasure hunt through Fremantle where teams can work together to find clues and solve a murder mystery. A very prominent, well-known crime writer has been murdered, and audiences are invited to solve that problem by finding the clues hidden in Fremantle, we've got another trail activity for kids where they can follow a map and collect pieces of a really beautiful artwork that's been created for us by James Foley, who's a fabulous author illustrator of children's books. And so we commissioned James to create this artwork, which is so fun. It's a really beautiful work. And the artwork has been reproduced as a series of magnets. So children can follow that trail and collect the artwork and take it home and put it on their fridge. Uh, we've got private storytelling events on Fremantle Wheel, so children again can have the experience of a private story time with the author of the book joining them in a gondola on the Ferris wheel. So meet the author, hear the book, and experience flying over Fremantle on the on the tour as well. Um, we've also got poetry readings on the wheel at sunset. So if you like your poetry with a beautiful view, then that's an event for you. We are also welcoming Jane Cara, who will be joining us for a couple of events, including a literary lunch where we will be talking to her about her diverse writing career and a whole range of different issues that she's very passionate about, including women's rights and public education. We are also running a program of events at the Maritime Museum that involves a virtual reality exhibition, as well as screenings of films and animated stories. We have a whole program of conversations and panel discussions taking place in various bars and venues throughout the city across the two week period. And we've got book launches, we've got poetry readings. We've got an enormous book market happening in the middle of the festival, where we'll also be presenting songwriters and poets and other performers throughout the day. So that's a great opportunity for audiences to come along and discover a whole range of writers and books that they may not typically come across in their local bookshop. And we're concluding the festival with the announcement of this year's Tag Hungerford Award winner. The Hungerford Award is a very important award in the literary community here in Western Australia, because it is an award for an emerging, unpublished author. And the Hungerford Award has launched the career of many, many West Australian authors. So it's it's a it's a brilliant way for us to wrap up the program by announcing the next West Australian author to be published by Fremantle Press.
00:24:19
S1: It sounds like the most wonderful festival. And if our listeners want to find out more, go to Totallylegit dot a Sharon Vision Australia Radio is proud to be an access and inclusion partner promoting the Totally Lit Festival. Would you tell us what this partnership means to you?
00:24:41
S2: Oh well, it means a lot because as I said earlier, an objective of these festivals is to connect audiences with great storytelling and great books and vision. Australia Radio does such a wonderful job of doing that, that partnering with you is just, you know, such a perfect fit for us and a great way for us to increase our community of readers and audiences.
00:25:13
S1: And it's great for us to hear. On the Emerging Writers program on Vision Australia radio. Sharon, what about after the festival for you? Are you planning a well-earned rest, or will you go straight into a new project?
00:25:28
S2: Oh, no no no no no. My sights are very firmly set on the the end of this festival. That's my horizon, and I. I'm not thinking beyond that, other than, as you said, probably quite a nice long rest.
00:25:45
S1: And again, for our listeners, if you want to find out more about the Totally Lit Festival, go to Totally lit dot a you. Thank you so much, Sharon. It's been fascinating speaking with you about the totally let adventures in the Port City Festival.
00:26:04
S2: Thank you Kate. Appreciate it.
00:26:05
S1: Our guest on Emerging Writers today was literary festival curator and producer Sharon Flindell. Speaking with us from Western Australia on the traditional lands of the Whadjuk Younger people. And next week on Emerging Writers, we'll be bringing you our interview with crime fiction writer Ruth McIver, who is a featured writer at the Crime Time Day on Saturday the 10th of October at the 2026 Totally Lit Adventures in the Port City Festival, being held in Fremantle from the 2nd to the 16th of October. This program is produced in our Adelaide Studios on Naata and can be heard at the same time each week here on Vision Australia Radio. Bay radio on digital. Online via radio.org or find us wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for emerging writers by Vision Australia Radio.
