We’re delighted to announce the inaugural
Liminal Festival for writers and readers!

After eight years of conversations, we are moving beyond print and screen for three thrilling days at The Wheeler Centre and beyond. From August 2–4, catch some of the nation’s most talented writers, artists and thinkers as they contemplate the ways language has dictated and transformed the culture around us. Join us as we speculate on possible paths forward. 

As Audre Lorde writes in Sister Outsider: “Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognise her role as vital within that transformation.”

How might we use the repetitions of history to imagine a different future? At once a celebration and interrogation, join the Liminal Festival to hear writers discuss the future of the novel, how language twists and turns under colonial occupation, the profound joys that come with collaboration, and much more.  

Opening Night

6PM—8PM | 2 August, 2024

For the past eight years, Liminal has carved out spaces for community to gather, converse and create. To open the inaugural Liminal Festival, we’re celebrating with readings from friends old and new. Taking on a brilliant range of genre and form, this event showcases what our rich literary landscape has to offer, with readings from Manisha Anjali, Evelyn Araluen, Brian Castro, Bella Li, Jennifer Nguyen, Mykaela Saunders and Michael Sun. 

Language Under Occupation

10AM—11Am | 3 August, 2024

I have all the theory in the world to explain the logics of our erasure, the violence of our replacements and our more palatable Others. [...]  But no one’s ever asked how we are both colonised by and inheritors of these words.
—Evelyn Araluen, “To the Poets”, Dropbear (2021)

Trace the contours of language, seek out its limits and push. Histories are cut up, struck through, misplaced, misremembered. Join Evelyn Araluen, Hasib Hourani and Mykaela Saunders as they discuss the careful craft of ripping the empire’s language to shreds. In their work, these brilliant writers shift form in myriad ways; they render nonlinear temporalities and introduce new vocabularies; they wield opacities and yet share the dearest of intimacies. Thinking through poetry and prose, language and craft, these three writers will share the shape of a language unsettled.

Visions & Revisions

11.30AM—12.30PM | 3 August, 2024

Each work that engages with history (and all do, to some degree or another) raises questions about how our visions and revisions of the past … inform the ways in which we live now, the ways we make sense of and treat each other, the ways we see beyond our individual moments to broader fractures and allegiances, collective memories or amnesias.
—Bella Li, Liminal Interview #73

Poems are inevitably entangled in our fraught and fraying histories. Projecting such visions and revisions of the past, a poem is an assemblage, a translation, a palimpsest. As Lucy Van writes in The Open: “Each day here is different. But say that each day here is the same. In this way, each day has no history. In this way, desire.” A poem as history’s cracked mirror; a kind of opening; a rock thrown into a lost lake. Hosted by Sydney Review of Books editor James Jiang, this event sees Bella Li and Lucy Van think through histories, poetics and how to wield language on one’s own terms. 

Supported by the Sydney Review of Books.

The Novel 

2PM—3PM | 3 August, 2024

The old novel … had defined boundaries within which information was traded for the reader’s loyalty to a common and national agenda. The new novel places the boundaries themselves under question.
— Brian Castro, “Heterotopias” (1994)

Thirty years after Brian Castro considered the ‘new novel’, three of Australia’s most talented contemporary novelists discuss the future of the form. Is there such a thing as a ‘Great Australian Novel’, or have twentieth-century paradigms expired? What, exactly, does greatness have to do with fiction? How does the novel relate to the nation?
Dr Lynda Ng, lecturer in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne, will host Jessica Au, Brian Castro and André Dao as they consider the novel, the nation, and the boundaries that shape them.

Critical Limit 

3.30PM—4.30PM | 3 August, 2024

Literary criticism seems to be in an endless state of decline. In so-called Australia, a particular flavour of cultural cringe is yoked to cultural hegemony: a critic might find themselves locked within the ivory tower, or self-censoring for fear of offence, or deliberately pursuing contrarianism for clicks. How, then, do critics move beyond this deadlock? Who decides what is 'good' criticism? What, exactly, is the function of criticism at the present time? This panel discussion sees Eda Gunaydin, Michael Sun and Cher Tan examine the possibilities of literary criticism, as well as the roles and responsibilities of the critic. Together they will pick apart these issues and attempt to propose a future for reviews that takes into account not only writers and editors, but readers and culture as a whole.

Writing Utopia: Poetics, Futurity + Friendship 

5PM—6PM | 3 August, 2024

How does poetry register the transformation of time and space? Where does the poet begin and end? In this session, poets Andrew Brooks and Elena Gomez consider writing friendship and futurity, comradely love and joyous passion. Drawing from a process of reading and writing together over the past few months, this session will move between poetry reading and conversation. Together, they’ll consider writing and reading as collaborative experiments.

Yesterday’s Goo with Jenny Zhang & Panda Wong

Digital | Released 4 August, 2024

‘I kept dripping yesterday’s goo’, Jenny Zhang writes, in her collection Baby First Birthday. Poems can be glorious repositories for the gooey, the disgusting, the visceral, the scatalogical. What can we read into such abject textures? Panda Wong writes, ‘memories are the meat of the world. I’m chewing over them like sinew.’ In this conversation, poets Jenny Zhang and Panda Wong discuss their poetics of disgust, of abjection, and of grief.  

Linework with Lee Lai & Jillian Tamaki

Digital | Released 4 August, 2024

Whether you impatiently page through panels or fall headfirst into the gutter, comics are a literary form that invite the reader in like no other. A new world appears in a brushstroke; a mark on the page can shift your mood, break your heart, swallow you whole. In this conversation, friends Jillian Tamaki and Lee Lai draw on their years-long artistic practices to think through the pleasures, pains and processes of comics making.

Little Fates with Yanyi & Danny Soberano

Digital | Released 4 August, 2024

How is a person known? Perhaps in the way their coffee cools; as Danny Soberano writes: ‘I knew even then / that I was changed’. Or perhaps, as Yanyi writes, it is in the nailing up a poster, or the stringing of lights across the wall.’ In poetry, each detail matters tenfold and weighs a tonne, but still floats easy, like steam off hot coffee. Poems become an attempt at understanding, a speculation of what else might be possible. In this conversation, Yanyi and Danny Soberano examine poetic form as a tool for knowing one’s self and our surrounds. 

Our festival booksellers, Amplify Bookstore, have pulled together a special collection featuring Liminal festival writers. Amplify is a specialist bookstore that only stocks books written by BIPOC authors; we spoke to co-founders Marina Sano and Jing Xuan Teo when Amplify launched back in 2020. Pick up a book from their selection online or in-person, 2-3 August at The Wheeler Centre. Shop the Liminal Festival collection here.