Source : the age
Much has been written recently about St Kilda’s downturn; fewer crowds post-COVID, the empty shopfronts, the once-thriving Acland Street becoming a pedestrianised ghost street. But on the Thursday after Easter when I meet Veronica Sullivan at Acland St’s legendary Cicciolina restaurant, it’s far from deserted.
Sullivan, the new director of the Melbourne Writers Festival, has been a local since childhood, and Cicciolina a firm favourite for years. She grew up around Elwood and Caulfield, and while she moved closer to the city in her share-house days, she came back to St Kilda just before the pandemic.
Melbourne Writers Festival’s new director Veronica Sullivan at St Kilda’s Cicciolina.Credit: Joe Armao
“I’ve always loved it, and I was so glad I moved back then – I was living in the George apartments and it was such a good thing because I was opposite the park, I had the beach down the street, and it made me feel that now I can’t live away from the water,” she says. “Not that I go swimming that much.”
It’s been hard, she says, to read the stories about the area. “Yes, there are rough sleepers and people with mental health issues, but those are the same issues that have been in the area for decades. It got really politicised and that kind of upsets me.”
As we peruse Cicciolina’s menu, the requisite parade of “colourful” characters passes us by on Acland Street, as if on cue. We order Coffin Bay oysters to share, and both opt for entree dishes; we’ve already looked at the dessert menu.
Two weeks out from her first festival as its director, Sullivan concedes to some nervousness. “I don’t feel … churning anxiety, but I feel a bit nervous – but it’s an excited nervousness.”
The Coffin Bay oysters at Cicciolina.Credit: Joe Armao
Each stage of organising Melbourne’s largest literary event, which attracts authors from around the world and around 50,000 book lovers, has come with its own jitters. “I’m like, ‘oh, this is what it feels like after the program comes out’, and then you’re waiting to hear what people say about it,” she says. “Now I’m at the point where, I’ve done most of the things I can do, and I’ve got to wait and hand it over to the production people.”
Sullivan has always been an avid reader, and had always wanted to work in something to do with writing and books. “I was an only child until I was 12 – I have half-siblings who are much younger – through those important, formative years, and I was always reading in a corner. That passion that was always there from childhood really remained so throughout my life.”
She grew up on Enid Blyton – “like, all of them” – and other classics including the Narnia books, and Judy Blume’s teen classics.
“Her books are freaking incredible. And then I was also picking my parents’ books off the shelves if they looked interesting – Stephen King, and things that were probably inappropriate!”
Sullivan hopes her curatorial choices for this year’s festival will appeal to a broader-than-usual audience of book lovers.Credit: Joe Armao
While she doesn’t call herself a writer herself, Sullivan studied creative writing at university. “Partly just because I wanted to work with books and didn’t know what else it could be like; that was never really clear.”
At careers counselling at school, Sullivan was told if she liked writing, ‘you should be a journalist or an editor’. “Like those are the two book-related jobs! So it took me a few years after school to … start to get a sense of the industry and the community and the landscape and partly my volunteering [at the festival] was part of that.”
She worked in a bookshop to “get the lay of the land”, and began as an MWF volunteer when she was 21. “I loved studying creative writing though because it was close readings, and it was philosophy and film theory and all these beautiful kinds of ways of expanding.”
Cicciolina’s charred WA octopus with taramasalata, chickpeas and Avruga caviar.Credit: Joe Armao
The course had different streams as well, in novel writing and screenwriting. “It was at RMIT and it was a very new course at the time, but it was great because it was super targeted; everything was around the craft of writing in various ways and I really loved it,” she says.
But it didn’t sway her into becoming a writer herself. “And I actually did a master’s in creative writing as well after that; I didn’t learn my lesson.”
She obviously wrote for that course, but decided when she finished, she was “done”. It was, she says, heartbreaking to realise how many “energetic, enthusiastic young people” come out of these courses each year into so few jobs. “That was quite eye-opening in some respects to be like, ‘well that industry is very … it’s a commercial business’. Yeah, you know it’s not like for the love of art!”
By this time, our food – and a glass of chardonnay each – has arrived: the charred WA octopus with taramasalata, chickpeas and Avruga caviar for Sullivan (“a flavour bomb”), the burrata, mortadella, guindilla peppers, pistachios and croutons for me. Between delicious mouthfuls, we discuss pets (she’s a dog person), books and our St Kilda experiences.
As well as volunteering, Sullivan interned with the Emerging Writers Festival, worked as the online editor for literary magazine Kill Your Darlings, as a prize manager for the Stella Prize and as a programming manager for the Feminist Writers Festival. For the past six years, she’s worked at The Wheeler Centre, most recently as the head of programming.
Burrata, mortadella, guindilla peppers, pistachios and croutons.Credit: Joe Armao
She’s not short on curatorial experience. But the Writers Festival is surely The Dream Job? “Totally,” she says. “Which isn’t to say that my last job wasn’t my dream job because it also was at the time, you know? But I think, having come and started being involved at 21 and at a very formative and impressionable age, it has continued to have a very special place in my heart. It’s always just been this space that I find really fertile and exciting. And it’s that feeling of being part of the community and the buzz that it generates.”
For her first festival, Sullivan has already created lots of that buzz herself. She’s also made the festival her own; this year is arguably the broadest it’s been, with a line-up that traverses the literary spectrum, from a Booker Prize winner to celebrity BookTok author and even Oz rock legend Jimmy Barnes.
There will also be live podcasting, a walking tour exploring Melbourne’s hidden feminist past, and a “translation slam”, in which two literary translators, Lilit Žekulin Thwaites and Alice Whitmore, will “joust” in real time, each translating an excerpt of a short work by Argentine author Mariana Enríquez into English.
The receipt for lunch at Cicciolina.
“There are a few events that I’ve wanted to do in some form, and I’ve kind of been waiting for the right moment or the right author,” Sullivan explains, adding that the only pressure to put her own “stamp” on the festival came from herself.
“I wanted to curate a festival with a distinct point of view, and to look at what the festival can be with fresh eyes,” she says. “It’s been exciting to bring new ideas to life and put together a program that is engaging and curious – and of course, I also wanted to honour and deepen the festival’s legacy, by keeping the elements audiences have loved for four decades at its heart.”
Over shared dessert of chocolate tart and cheese and crackers (and another glass of chardonnay), Sullivan says she imagines Barnesy’s appearance will likely be the one that attracts the most men – it’s mostly women who attend writers festivals. And headliner Marian Keyes, master of the romcom and one of the most commercially successful authors to appear at MWF (and who has announced a second appearance), will likely be older women. Possibly, Sullivan ventures, some of whom haven’t been to a festival before.
“Her event is also on Mother’s Day, so I imagine it might be a multi-generational audience. It’s been amazing how many people have come out of the woodwork to say they’re excited to see her,” she says. “I think there is a not-unfounded perception among some audiences that writers festivals have historically privileged authors of highbrow literary works over popular, commercial or genre fiction, but these categories are not mutually exclusive.”
She knew early on that she wanted to make space for all types of fiction. “My job is to program events that readers want to attend, and in a city as diverse as Melbourne, I’d be selling the festival short and limiting our audiences if I didn’t make space for the widest possible range of writers and stories.”
And while last year’s festival was marred by the now-common controversy in the arts over programming related to the Israel-Palestine conflict (leading to the chair, deputy chair and others resigning in protest), she envisages most political discourse this year will focus on the matters closer to home.
“Given the festival falls a week after the federal election, our political programming this year is primarily focused on Australian politics; I want to help our audiences make sense of the election outcome and where we are at as a nation,” she says.
“However, any political conversation necessarily encompasses global dimensions, including Israel/Palestine, and I absolutely welcome those conversations at the festival.”
Melbourne Writers Festival runs May 8 to 11. mwf.com.au
The Age is a festival partner.
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