The Byron Bay Writers Festival had its beginnings in 1997, when a small group of locals led by Chris Hanley wondered whether authors might accept an invitation to spend a winter’s weekend in Byron Bay. They did, and an audience of two hundred  locals enjoyed a gathering of fifty Australian writers. Since then, the Festival has grown from a single venue event to fill four huge marquees and venues around town and sells 45,000 individual tickets. The guest list now numbers more than one hundred and over the years the most significant and respected contemporary Australian writers have participated through lectures, lunches, panels, conversations, launches and readings.

The focus of the program is firmly on Australian writing, with recognition of our physical place in the world through the inclusion of Indonesian and Asian authors. The Byron Bay Writers Festival enjoys a close relationship with the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival and believes that through words and ideas, bridges are formed that cross cultures and schisms. Fundamentally, the Festival provides a forum for intelligent discussion and guests are invited to address the issues that matter to them as writers and which necessarily concern us all. It is a celebration of the vitality of thought and creativity with a healthy emphasis on fun.

The Byron Bay Writers Festival runs from the 7th August to 9th August 2009. See you there!

In 1978 the New South Wales Government inaugurated the annual New South Wales Premiers Literary Awards to honour distinguished achievement by Australian writers. The Awards are announced during the Sydney Writers’ Festival. The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards are the richest literary awards in Australia.

The NSW Premiers Book of the Year for 2009 is ‘The Boat’ by Nam Le .

Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He has previously received the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Phillips Exeter Academy. His fiction has appeared in venues including Zoetrope: All-Story, A Public Space, Conjunctions, One Story, NPR’s, Selected Shorts and the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best New American Voices, Best Australian Stories, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.

The Boat is a stunningly inventive, deeply moving fiction debut: stories that take the readers from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a tiny fishing village in Australia to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea, in a masterful display of literary virtuosity and feeling. In the opening story, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father’s experiences in Vietnam — and what seems at first a satire on turning one’s life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of homeland, and the ties between father and son.

Full list of all the winners can be found here .