The seventh Crime & Justice Festival will take place at Readers Feast Bookstore in Melbourne on 15-16 November 2014. As Readers Feast General Manager Mary Dalmau points out, the festival is ‘the only one of its kind in the world’ that brings those working in the fields of justice and social justice together with writers of crime fiction and true crime to explore the big issues of the day.
Guests include Michael Mori, the former US Marine and author of In the Company of Cowards, who defended Australian Guantanamo prisoner David Hicks. For me, Mori is a real-life hero and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to hear him speak with Russ Radcliffe in a session called ‘Bush, Howard and Injustice at Guantanamo’.
If that wasn’t enough, I get to chair what I consider my ‘fantasy panel’ with outstanding Australian writers of historical crime fiction, Sulari Gentill and Robert Gott, in ‘Once Upon A Crime’, on Saturday 15 November, midday at Readers Feast Bookstore.
I’ve just finished reading Sulari’s latest novel in the award-winning Rowland Sinclair series, A Murder Unmentioned. Sulari demonstrates with this series an impressive ability to shift the focus from broad (Hitler’s Germany) to narrow (family estate in rural NSW, as in the latest book), all the while holding her readers’ interest through pace and character development.
Robert is the author of two historical crime series, the hilarious Will Power novels, and a new series that opens with, The Holiday Murders (shortlisted for the 2013 Ned Kelly Award), set in Melbourne’s nascent Homicide Department in late-1943 and featuring DI Titus Lambert, Constables Helen Lord and Joe Sable. I’ve been lucky enough to get an advance reading copy of the sequel, The Port Fairy Murders, and it’s breathtakingly good.
Later on Saturday afternoon, David Marr will be talking with Morag Fraser about his new book The Prince: Faith, Abuse & George Pell in a session called ‘Power, Politics and the Church’.
Other festival guests include Julie Szego, Liam Houlihan and Susanna Lobez. Full details for the two-day program are here.
Angela Savage 
This sounds wonderful, Angela! I wish all of you well, and I certainly wish I could be there.
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Sounds great! There really seems to be a vibrancy in Australian writing circles at the moment. Unfortunately quite often the books don’t get published over here, or they come out at prohibitive prices. Hopefully as the authors get better known around the world that will change…
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FF, book pricing is such a fraught issue for us in Australia. I know my books are priced out of the market when they do get released in the USA and UK. And yet it’s hard when you rely on royalties to argue that your books should cost less! There must be a happy medium somewhere…
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So looking forward to it, Angela… how brilliant to be invited to talk crime and books with two of my very favourite writers and people!
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Ditto, Sulari 🙂
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How lucky and well-deserved for you to chair the panel with those two excellent writers. Can’t wait to hear all about it. Wish I’d be a proverbial fly on the wall.
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