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Make booking for Writers Festival

Staff ReporterWestern Suburbs Weekly

All reading eyes focused on UWA.

I speak of the Perth Writers Festival.

If you didn’t go, then you deserve to figuratively and literally beat yourself up.

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‘I was gunna go’ just doesn’t cut it.

Life passes you by whilst you’re busy thinking about booking tickets and finding a parking space!

I made the effort (and it was an effort to find the time) but the experience will stay with me until I start pushing up grass at Karrakatta.

To watch and listen to the 74-year-old Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood laugh and almost flirt with futuristic fantasy writer China Mieville was beautiful and intimate.

To have the opportunity to have a tete a tete with her afterwards whilst she autographed my tome was heart-stopping (nothing worse than a literary groupie!).

To listen to the urban commentator David Marr describe the vanity of author Patrick White through photographs and portraits was a delight.

According to David, White struggled with ‘eyes that were straight, a mouth that was camp!’.

When I asked David if anyone under 30-years-old was reading White, he said the book sales were still encouraging.

How to get my 17-year-old daughter to read him?

‘Give her The Twyborn Affair,’ was his suave reply.

And to watch a very frail and aging Phillip Adams interview investigative reporter Chris Masters on his latest book about Aussie Diggers in Afghanistan was to be in the presence of two towering Australian intellectuals.

Magic moments in magic days.