I’m off to the Clunes Booktown Festival and I’m excited! And it’s not just because I’m sharing the program with some of my favourite Australian writers. It’s because the Festival brings together the biggest collection of ‘rare, out-of-print, new, small-press publications, second hand and collectable books in Australia’.
In recognition of the concentration of antiquarian bookshops and second hand booksellers in Clunes – where even the local grocery store sells books – the old gold town has just been added to the list of the world’s 15 international book towns.
I’ll be part of two sessions at the Festival. The first, at 1.30 on Saturday, is a panel discussion called ‘Behind the Shock Machine – did science go too far?’ with Justin Oakley, Director of the Monash University Centre for Human Bioethics and Radio National’s Lynne Malcolm. The session is organised by the Royal Institution of Australia and will be recorded for Radio National’s ‘All in the Mind.’
On Sunday morning I’ll be running a workshop on science writing for a broad audience, which will be a more practical ‘how to’ kind of session with lots of opportunities for questions and discussion.
If you’re coming along to Clunes, come and say hello. If you don’t manage to catch either of my sessions, you’re bound to run into me at one of the stalls or at some of the other great sessions planned for the weekend.
Clunes is just 25 miles north of Ballarat, an easy day trip from Melbourne.