The 60th anniversary festival will run from May 3 to 8, with CEO Sarah Runcie looking forward to what will be a Brisbane celebration of survival on many levels, especially in the wake of the recent floods and pandemic.

“Oh, it’s so significant,” Runcie said. “We’re the oldest continuous writers’ festival in Australia and I think it’s an important aspect to Brisbane’s cultural history that that’s the case.

“As a former southerner from Sydney, one of the pleasures that I’ve had in moving up to Brisbane to take on my role, has been to discover the city and to discover what is here in Brisbane. There is so much that is culturally valuable and unique, and Brisbane Writers Festival is part of that.”

Overcoming a flooded out event launch was just part of the challenge of bringing the festival to the people for another year.

The focus is now on the pre-festival event featuring Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert in conversation with Professor Peter Greste on March 31 at the Judith Wright Centre.

Dr Moore-Gilbert’s book The Uncaged Sky unfolds her harrowing ordeal of being incarcerated for 804 days in Tehran, after being convicted of espionage by Iran’s most notorious judge and sentenced to ten years in prison. Greste, a former Reuters, BBC and CNN correspondent, was also imprisoned – by Egypt – for more than two years.

“Because we did have a launch that was flooded out, I’m delighted that we had this pre-festival event as well, because I think that Kylie’s experience and how she has written about it is such a valuable story to hear,” Runcie said.

“And I think that it also goes beyond that being an extraordinary story to really, I think, touching on those things that are important in so many ways, which is the importance of hope.

“That’s an important aspect of really any creative endeavour, but I think it’s an important thing particularly in a time of disaster.”

Award winning author and poet and proud Wiradjuri woman Dr Anita Heiss is featuring in a number of festival events, and said the timing is a sweet relief.

“By May, I think we’re going to see this enormous celebration, not only of books and literature and authors being able to meet their readers and vice versa, but the fact that we can all come together in one place again after so long,” Heiss said.

“What we’re going to see particularly this year in Brisbane is another one of these enormous celebrations, because now we’ll be able to have people from all the other States and territories come in, even though I know the State Library and the Cultural Precincts have been shut.

“The festival this year will take on a different role because it is a place where people can come together and escape for a little while, through fiction or through poetry, through children’s stories and so forth, and also be around like-minded people with visions for the global village that we live in.

“We are also seeing what’s unfolding in the Ukraine, another travesty, and I think there’ll be plenty of conversations on panels about how we can see the world through different lenses and through perspectives that can hopefully make more people more empathetic to what’s happening outside of our own circles.”

A new feature of the Brisbane Writers Festival is “Brisbane as a Storied City”, curated by Nick Earls, pairing ten writers and poets with the places they have drawn inspiration from.

Events in that program include a banquet dinner with The Family Law author Benjamin Law at Sunnybank’s Landmark Restaurant; Yumi Stynes in conversation with Pig City writer Andrew Stafford at iconic music venue The Zoo, and a special presentation of Clare McFadden’s The Flying Orchestra, featuring the Queensland Youth Orchestra, at Brisbane City Hall.

BWF CEO Sarah Runcie said the intimacy of this part of the program allowed audiences to get up close and personal with their favourite authors.

“The Brisbane Writers Festival needs to reflect Brisbane as a city. And we do that in a couple of ways. Part of it is platforming the writers that we have here, and there’s such a lot of literary depth in Brisbane, you can hardly run out of talent really,” she said. “But also it’s the stories that make up Brisbane’s sense of its history.

“I think really appropriately, we’ve got Margaret Cook talking about Brisbane’s flooding, and the history of that through her book, a discussion about her book, which is A River with a City Problem. So very apropos that discussion with Margaret Cook. As far as disasters go, I feel like we’re addressing that one.”

Dr Anita Heiss is particularly excited by the move to make many of the BWF events free with the option to donate, with others ticketed, enabling a more diverse audience to attend.

“That means for those people who can afford to pay $20 or $50, that’s great, they will cover it for people who don’t have that capacity,” Heiss said.

“And I think that is a wonderful opportunity, because it means nobody misses out.

“In some of the bigger festivals where ticketing is quite expensive it does limit people being able to attend one or more events. So I think that’s a great initiative.”

Heiss is also looking forward to reflecting on the ten years since the original edition of her pivotal book Am I Black Enough For You?, with “the matriarch of bookselling” Fiona Stager.

“Her wonderful shop, Avid Reader in West End has done lots of things during the floods as well. We were all up there charging our phones and our laptops. She made pots of tea for the elderly neighbours,” Heiss said.

“In the last 10 years since the original edition of Am I Black Enough for You? came out, I’ve started learning my traditional language, we have seen obviously life in a pre and post Covid world and how we navigate that as authors but also just as individuals in society.

“We’ve seen the Black Lives Matter movement that had been going on for three decades in Australia, but of course became more prominent with the very public death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. In Brisbane alone, I marched with 36,000 other people in that massive march.

“We’ve had a renaissance in First Nations writing, and so I offer 20 specific reasons on why I think readers should be engaging with black literature in Australia.

“We’ve seen Cathy Freeman become one of our nations’ darlings, and it’s been two decades since she won gold. But at the same time, we’ve seen another Australian elite athlete, an Australian of the Year, Adam Goodes be almost crucified in the final years of his playing in the AFL for the Sydney Swans, a twice Brownlow Medallist. I’ve tried to throw a bit of a spotlight on those two sporting legends and Australians of the Year to see why the nation treated both those athletes quite differently.

“I love festivals because I get to meet my readers and I get to hear what they liked, what they didn’t like sometimes. I get to hear that too and that helps to make me a better writer, I think.”

Heiss said she is pleased that First Nations knowledge and history has become better acknowledged and respected since that book was first released. She will also speak about her new novel Bila Yarudhanggalangdhuray, about the great flood of Gundagai.

“I’ve had all these people tweet me and message me about how, because of what’s been happening in Brisbane and the Northern Rivers, the story resonates with them,” she said.

“And now we’re hearing back then the local Wiradyuri people warned the settlers not to build in this area, the flood place, because it would flood and they didn’t listen, and of course they lost all these lives.

“There’s things resonating today, things that could have been done better, and how important it is to be listening to Indigenous knowledge of land and waters and climate and so forth.”