2010
Catching up on the Festival highlights
13 October 2010
The two highlights have been the two Book Club Breakfasts on Saturday and Sunday, held at a lovely little open-air cafe called The Three Monkeys, bordered by a duck-filled rice paddy. The local Ubud Book Club runs these breakfasts and has access to top writers. The club provides the interviewers too, not the professional journalists who do the main festival "In Conversations". The two local expat women did just as well if not better. These Breakfasts cost $22 while the huge lunches with famous authors at 5-star hotels cost $100, and the breakfasts are far more intimate and also don't take you away from the main program for 4 hours in the middle of the day. Fabulous breakfast too - no need for lunch later! And we had very close contact with the authors - Saturday was Louis de Bernières and Sunday, Australia's Cate Kennedy. They were both lovely and approachable - had a long chat with Cate as I arrived early, about her book set in Tasmania. (The very detailed day-by-day account of the famous bushwalk trail through Tasmania was researched on Google and blogs - she did not actually do it!! – because she was pregnant at the time of her research.) In both cases we sat at tables right next to the speaker. Plenty of opportunity to ask questions. I had just read both their latest books in the last couple of weeks, so great to talk about them immediately after, while the books are fresh in one's mind.
Another highlight was hearing Australia's Nam Le (of The Boat) interviewed - deeply intellectual and analytical of his writing craft and also very human. I finally read The Boat this year so it was fresh in my mind too. He is an absolute hunk! He lives in America now but many of his stories are very Australian, even, or especially, when written outside Australia. The only thing was the young female interviewer engaged him with her eyes - turning towards him the whole time and somehow forcing him to look only at her and not at the audience, and a large section of the audience only saw the back of his head or at the best, his profile. I went up later and told them both this for future reference. She agreed it was important and was unaware she had been doing this.
Great couple of sessions involving East Timor - Tony Maniaty who wrote Shooting Balibo about making the film Balibo on the deaths of six Aussie journalists in East Timor in 1975 – The Balibo Five and Roger East, the sixth. (I had a chat with Maniaty at a Lowy Institute seminar in Sydney before I left). Also the author, Sarah Niner, of Xanana's biography and a Timorese, Teo Ximenes, a writer who has won the competition for short novels written in Tetum, about one of the many hundreds of East Timorese kids forcibly taken from their parents and sent to Indonesia between 1975 and the 1990s, and put in Indonesian homes to become indoctrinated Indonesians. They are still here - Indonesian adults. Only a very few have got back home and found their parents. Alas, we can’t read this book yet until it is translated.
That is enough for today - I'm sure I'll have more to write about the festival when I have digested all that has happened in recent days.
Cathy leaves tonight - I am going down with her to have dinner before she goes to the airport with the Aussie guy, based here, who led our Intrepid trip to Timor five years ago. Going to visit Alex's house later this morning we hope, as Cathy has not seen it finished.
Just received a set of copies of my other newly-printed novel translation Above the Day Below the Night, by Putu Oka Sukanta, - It is about sex workers (some of them underage) and the woman doctor who tries to help them, on the island of Batam near Singapore. I did this six years ago when I met Putu at the first Ubud festival - it has taken a very long time for the finished product to get back to me, but only recently has the author got the funding to print it. Putu had said he would send my six copies to Bali to Alex's PO Box address for me to collect, but Alex said they had not come, so I assumed he had not posted them after all. I got an email from Putu this morning asking if I had got them. I checked again with Alex who had no idea what might have happened to them, but I decided to go to the PO myself - and sure enough they were there - and had been for weeks. Not sure what went wrong there. Anyway the important thing is I have them before I leave Bali. And the parcel of four more copies of Mirah that I bought from Lontar Press and were posted in Jakarta only four days ago had also arrived. These are for Ubud folk, so now I will be able to sign their copies before I leave. Above the Day is a very slim little novella and has a totally inappropriate picture on the cover of a highly made-up baby doll!! Not sure where that came from. My picture and bio notes as translator are on the back cover along with the author's - unlike Mirah where I just got my name in tiny print!
Alex and I caught up with Sarah, the Writers Festival Managing Director, over lunch yesterday- a great chance to get the inside story on the festival and writers. A great success by all accounts - very positive evaluations. Biggest and best festival yet - all the writers were very impressed, and loved the opportunities to mingle with the readers that don't seem to exist in more formal city festivals across the world. Louis de Bernières had a ball!
That is enough for today - I'm sure I'll have more to write about the festival when I have digested all that has happened in recent days.
Cathy leaves tonight - I am going down with her to have dinner before she goes to the airport with the Aussie guy, based here, who led our Intrepid trip to Timor five years ago. Going to visit Alex's house later this morning we hope, as Cathy has not seen it finished.
Just received a set of copies of my other newly-printed novel translation Above the Day Below the Night, by Putu Oka Sukanta, - It is about sex workers (some of them underage) and the woman doctor who tries to help them, on the island of Batam near Singapore. I did this six years ago when I met Putu at the first Ubud festival - it has taken a very long time for the finished product to get back to me, but only recently has the author got the funding to print it. Putu had said he would send my six copies to Bali to Alex's PO Box address for me to collect, but Alex said they had not come, so I assumed he had not posted them after all. I got an email from Putu this morning asking if I had got them. I checked again with Alex who had no idea what might have happened to them, but I decided to go to the PO myself - and sure enough they were there - and had been for weeks. Not sure what went wrong there. Anyway the important thing is I have them before I leave Bali. And the parcel of four more copies of Mirah that I bought from Lontar Press and were posted in Jakarta only four days ago had also arrived. These are for Ubud folk, so now I will be able to sign their copies before I leave. Above the Day is a very slim little novella and has a totally inappropriate picture on the cover of a highly made-up baby doll!! Not sure where that came from. My picture and bio notes as translator are on the back cover along with the author's - unlike Mirah where I just got my name in tiny print!
Alex and I caught up with Sarah, the Writers Festival Managing Director, over lunch yesterday- a great chance to get the inside story on the festival and writers. A great success by all accounts - very positive evaluations. Biggest and best festival yet - all the writers were very impressed, and loved the opportunities to mingle with the readers that don't seem to exist in more formal city festivals across the world. Louis de Bernières had a ball!