IN even-numbered years there is no other choice: literature lovers from all over Australia and beyond schedule their holidays for the first week in March and gather in their thousands in tents beneath trees beside the Torrens Parade Ground for a literary feast that has no equal.
Adelaide Writers’ Week is celebrated world-wide for the quality and diversity of the writers, both local and international, that it brings together, and this year’s line-up is one of its most exciting.

A special focus on Canada – a country which shares both Australia’s colonial past and our more recently developed sense of US encroachment – brings six Canadian writers to this year’s event: First Nations poet and playwright Daniel David Moses, award winning Lorna Crozier, pyrotechnic performance poet Christian Bök and novelists David Adams Richards, Alistair MacLeod (author of the IMPAC award winner, No Great Mischief), and Margaret Atwood. Her cautionary dystopia Oryx and Crake was shortlisted for the latest Booker Prize – and, incidentally, borrows the name of a rare Australian bird triumphantly spotted by the author on one of her previous visits to this country.

Like Atwood, several of the 23 overseas visitors coming to Writers’ Week are well known in Australia. The works of Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, expatriate poet and critic Clive James, returning novelist Janette Turner Hospital and iconoclastic feminist Jeanette Winterson (making her first visit to Australia) are all punctually reviewed in the local press and readily available in libraries and bookshops.

Ruth Rendell and Reginald Hill, stars in their different orbits in the British crime firmament, populate our TV programs with well-loved characters – Inspector Wexford, Dalziel and Pascoe – and regularly sell more books in this country than their home -grown crime-scene counterparts.

Other visitors may be less familiar – and much of the attraction of Writers’ Week is the opportunity to make new discoveries, to open up a back-list treasure trove of texts that can be enjoyed for years after the tents have been struck and the authors returned to their far flung homelands.

British writer Salley Vickers is already gaining a following in this country with subtle, witty, observant novels reminiscent of Penelope Fitzgerald or Barbara Pym. Her interest in the connections between literature, psychology and religion is reflected in her three books to date: the entrancing Miss Garnet’s Angel (set in a shimmering Venice), Instances of the Number Three and her whimsical latest, Mr Golightly’s Holiday.

Jens Christian Grøndahl is one of Denmark’s most celebrated and widely-read writers. His literary work includes plays, essays and 11 novels, three of which have been translated into English with a fourth due out in time for Writers’ Week. Silence in October, Lucca and the deceptively slight Virginia are all intense explorations of human relationships, full of memorable and illuminating insights. Irish writer Anne Enright, noted for her lush and lovely language, has published short stories and novels including The Wig my Father Wore, What Are You Like? and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, a vivid recreation of 19th century Paraguay via the red-haired Irish mistress of dictator Francesco Solano Lopez.

Catherine Lim, raised in Malaysia but long resident in Singapore, has written seven collections of short stories and a number of novels including The Bondmaid and Following the Wrong God Home. Her latest, The Song of Silver Frond, is a romance between the extremes of youth and age, poverty and plenty, set against a colourful background of Singaporean village life in the late 1940s – intractable gods, scheming hierarchies of wives, importunate parents and through it all the turbulent course of tenderness and true love.

Andrea Levy was born in London to Jamaican immigrant parents. Her novels – the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin’, Never Far from Nowhere, Fruit of the Lemon and Small Island, which will be released to coincide with Writers’ Week – explore from a variety of viewpoints the experience of being British-born and black.

Hip young Israeli writer Etgar Keret is a child of Holocaust survivors. His name translates as “urban challenge” – a fitting tag, he suggests, for short stories which are brief, biting, bizarre and often bitter, written in the style of jagged folk tales and frequently furnished with final barbs and unexpected twists. More than 40 films have been based on his short stories, two collections of which are available in English – The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God and The Nimrod Flip-Out.

American science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, described by one critic as the Quentin Tarantino of cyberpunk, has something of a cult following, particularly among young men. His novels include Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Zodiac and the recently-released Quicksilver (a prequel to Cryptonomicon). They deal in both the future and the past, in codes of all descriptions, and posit real and invented societies that comment mercilessly upon our own.

On the more serious side of science, and also from the US, is Alan Lightman, physicist, philosopher and novelist. His books include Origins, Einstein’s Dreams, The Diagnosis and Reunion. Lightman will be a new discovery for me, as will Netherlands novelist and playwright Adriaan van Dis, New Zealand writer Damien Wilkins, and Yvonne Vera, the internationally acclaimed writer and social critic from Zimbabwe (Butterfly Burning, Without a Name, Under the Tongue and The Stone Virgins).

An overseas guest in 1996, distinguished South African novelist and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee will play host this year, having settled in SA and been recruited to the Writers’ Week advisory committee.

He will be joined in the program by 48 talented Australian writers, from household names such as novelist Kate Grenville, political biographer Don Watson and children’s writer John Marsden to emerging writers such as Adelaide novelist Stephen Orr (Attempts to Draw Jesus), Pakistani-born WA painter and writer Wayne Ashton (Under a Tin-Grey Sari) and Vogel award winner Sarah Hay (Skins).

A strong contingent of indigenous authors is expected, including novelists Vivienne Cleven (Bitin’ Back, Her Sister’s Eye) and Philip McLaren (Sweet Water – Stolen Land, Scream Black Murder, Lightning Mine, There’ll be New Dreams and Utopia), playwright John Harding (Up the Road, No Parking) and South Australian “stolen child” Doris Kartinyeri (Kick the Tin).
There is a strong emphasis on fiction, including crime – represented by Peter Temple (creator of popular Jack Irish), black, black ironist Caroline Shaw (Cat Catcher and Eye to Eye) and Adelaide chick lit specialist Kirsty Brooks (Lady Luck and The Vodka Dialogue). However, non-fiction has not been overlooked.

Canadian poets will be matched with Australians Adam Aitkin, Laurie Duggan, Kate Lilley and Geoff Page. Jenny Uglow (UK biographer of George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth and, most recently in The Lunar Men, Watt, Wedgewood and Erasmus Darwin) will have her Australian counterpart in Brenda Niall (the Boyds; Georgiana McCrae).

The presence, among others, of Asia expert Christopher Kremmer (The Carpet Wars, Stalking the Elephant Kings), historian David Day, philosopher Raimond Gaita, art critic Bernard Smith and composer, writer and broadcaster Andrew Ford (of Radio National’s The Music Show) will ensure informed and enthralling coverage of an eclectic range of topics.

As has come to be confidently expected, there will be something for everyone at Adelaide Writers’ Week 2004.