Speculative Fiction Festival and guests and program announced, plus mass signing at Galaxy!

May 10, 2023

The end of June is going to be a blast. I’ve had the honour of being made director of the 2023 Speculative Fiction Festival at WritingNSW, in Callan Park, Sydney, being held on Saturday June 24th. And more than that, we’ve got a huge group signing the next day at Galaxy Books in Sydney. Read on for all the details.

The WritingNSW Speculative Fiction Festival has been going for a long time and it’s always a blast. I think I first went in about 2006? It’s been held bi-annually ever since (Covid years not included) so you can imagine how it felt now to be invited to direct the latest one. What a trip! WritingNSW gave me some guidelines and a budget, then we opened to expressions of interest, and I had to build a festival. That involved coming up with panels of discussion (from my own ideas and others peoples’ suggestions) that would cover the full spectrum of science-fiction, fantasy and horror from both a craft, business and reader perspective. It was a hell of a juggling act and I could easily have programmed three days with the amount of cool people who were up for it and making suggestions. But what I have ended up distilling into the one day should be freaking epic.

The general focus is more on writers than fans, as it’s an initiative of WritingNSW, which is the NSW Writers Centre, but there will be heaps of value to non-writers as well. I’ve also tried to make sure I cover not only novelists and short story writers, but screenwriters, game writers, comics, and more. And for the non-writing fans and avid readers, there’s another event the following day, more on that in a moment.

First of all, look at all the amazing people who have generously agreed to speak and be involved in the 2023 Festival. (Click the image to make it bigger.)

And then take a look at the awesome program of events for the day:

Sounds like an amazing day, right? Tickets are on sale now and you can learn all you need from here: https://writingnsw.org.au/whats-on/events/2023-speculative-fic-fest/ If you’re anywhere close to Sydney, or you can travel in, I highly recommend it. It’s well worth the effort, especially as it’s not just the one day. If you can only manage one day, the Festival on Saturday is the one to make. But there’s an event on Sunday too.

There will be more information about this over the next few weeks, but we’re making a weekend of it. At least a dozen of the festival guests will be sticking around in Sydney and on Sunday we’ll be at Galaxy Books, at Level 1, 131 York Street, Sydney, where we’ll be hanging out, talking, and signing books for a couple of hours. Watch this space for more information about that.

So that’s June 24th and 25th, 2023 in Sydney. Be there!

 

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