Typically, the big names drew the biggest crowds, with popular sessions featuring Val McDermid, Joe Bageant and festival favourite Norman Doidge, who attended the 2008 festival and gave this year's closing address.
Festival director Jane O'Hara told the Weekly Book Newsletter that audience numbers were up on last year--at around 30,100 ‘at last count', compared to approximately 29,000 last year. The children's wordplay program was also ‘at capacity at 10,000 participants'.
This year, a particular focus was given to African writing, with an opening night address from E C Osondu, winner of the 2009 Caine Prize for African writing, and sessions with fellow Caine Prize winner Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. On opening night, O'Hara held up a dog-eared copy of 10 Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing (New Internationalist), which she described as her starting point for this year's festival.
Standout sessions from some of the ‘smaller names' included conversations with Canadian writers Ian Brown (The Boy in the Moon, Scribe), who talked about his experience of raising a child with a rare genetic disorder, and Jaspreet Singh (Chef, Bloomsbury), who offered insight into the India-Pakistan conflict.
Passions were fired in a session with Bob Hawke and Blanche d'Alpuget on the subject of author bias, with the former PM defending what he felt was a dispassionate account of his years in office by his wife.
From the bookshop
Sales were ‘well up on last year' at the festival bookshop, according to The Library Shop manager Julie Melville, with Simon Winchester's Atlantic (HarperPress) the bestselling title. Queensland sailor Jessica Watson ‘had the biggest line' for author signings, said Melville, ‘but lots of people were getting her to sign slips of paper rather than the book.'
The Library Shop bestseller list was as follows:
- Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories (Simon Winchester, HarperPress)
- The Brain That Changes Itself (Norman Doidge, Scribe)
- The Happiest Refugee (Anh Do, A&U)
- The Castle in the Pyrenees (Jostein Gaarder, Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
- Deer Hunting with Jesus (Joe Bageant, Scribe)
- Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir (Joe Bageant, Scribe)
- The Sixth Wave: How to Succeed in a Resource-Limited World (James Bradfield Moody, Vintage)
- Imperfect Creation: Cosmos, Life and Nature's Hidden Code (Marcelo Gleiser, Black Inc.)
- Thai-riffic! (Oliver Phommavanh, Puffin)
- True Spirit: The Aussie Girl Who Took on the World (Jessica Watson, Hachette)
- Brisbane (Matthew Condon, NewSouth Books).
