A Message from Festival Director Veronica Sullivan
In 2026, we celebrate the 40th anniversary edition of your Melbourne Writers Festival.
This year’s theme, Visions & Revisions, celebrates the visionary capability of writers and honours the process of continual remaking that is integral to literature, humanity – and to festivals. No story appears fully formed on the page at its inception. Rather, writers and storytellers bravely acknowledge mistakes, embrace imperfection, and revise. They make it new, and make new meaning.
Since 1986, MWF has been shaped and sustained by countless visions. Whether contributing as artists, audiences, volunteers or supporters – many hands, hearts, pens and minds have forged the festival’s legacy.
At a time when freedom of expression is under pressure and writers face increasing attempts to constrain their voices, we are proud to welcome a bold and insightful lineup to MWF this May.
You will hear from bestsellers, prize winners and electric new voices in fiction, poetry and memoir; from our most trusted journalists and political commentators; and from local writers who have been inspired by our City of Literature. You'll be transported around the world; from the jungles of Borneo, to a housing commission in Hungary... and to the very depths of Hell.
Opening Night kicks off with creative reflections on this year’s MWF theme from a roster of extraordinary festival guests, including Omar Musa, Don Watson, Ariana Reines and Sophia Brous.
On Friday night, we take over Melbourne Town Hall for conversations with two remarkable women. Memoirist, mother and former Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will share what it means to model a different kind of power, and bestselling fantasy novelist R. F. Kuang will discuss her mind-bending latest novel Katabasis.
This year’s First Nations Guest Curators – Evelyn Araluen, Anita Heiss and Daniel James – have each crafted unmissable events that illuminate culture, politics and the craft of storytelling in new and essential ways, including a unique collaboration between Araluen and nehiyaw novelist Jessica Johns.
We welcome the winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, David Szalay, along with shortlistee Susan Choi and longlistee Maria Reva, to discuss their expansive novels. The 2002 Booker Prize winner, Yann Martel, also returns to Australia for the first time in a decade with a transporting new work of fiction.
This year, we’ll celebrate works in translation with a focus on Japanese writers, including bestselling novelists Genki Kawamura and Mieko Kawakami. Our phenomenally popular Translation Slam event returns, with a featured ghost story by cultural historian Hiroko Yoda.
Big issues come to the fore in chewy discussions about politics, independent media, democracy, disability and environmentalism. Feminist programming covers topics ranging from sex, love, rage and poetry; from honouring matriarchies, to women’s experiences in wartime. Fiction-focused conversations explore mythical retellings, the animal parts of ourselves, the decline of the Great Australian Dream of home-ownership, and the inexorable rise of dark academia.
Professor Toby Walsh delivers the 2026 John Button Oration, asking whether AI is leading us towards a boom of potential, or to our doom. Stephanie Alexander sits down for a Mother’s Day fireside chat marking the thirtieth anniversary of her home-cooking bible, The Cook’s Companion.
Fancy immersing yourself in something a little different? Take a projected tour of the universe at the Planetarium, explore a walking tour through Melbourne’s cultural past, test your wits at a cryptic crossword workshop or luxuriate in the world premiere of a song cycle based on the transcendent poetry of the late Dorothy Porter.
Part interactive art installation, part bicycle-powered publishing house, The Book Factory invites audiences of all ages to take part in the writing, printing, pressing and binding of original books on the State Library Victoria forecourt! Visit between festival sessions to contribute your own writing or artwork, jump on a bike and power the printing press, or just watch the magic unfold.
Young readers and families will be delighted by free storytime and craft events. In the suburbs, we're partnering with local libraries and councils to bring some of the most exciting MWF authors into local communities.
At our Closing Night event one of Melbourne’s most beloved authors, Tony Birch, will deliver an impassioned address encouraging us all – writers and readers alike – to nurture an ethical imagination.
In his poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, T. S. Eliot wrote:
There will be time, there will be time...
...time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Allow us to drop a question on your plate, as we embrace the curiosity, possibility and humanity of the creative process – and the eternal seeking that propels it.
We hope you’ll join us at MWF as together we explore many visions, and infinite revisions.