When     Tuesday, October 2, 2012 at 8:00pm
Where     Copley Hall Copley Formal Lounge 

When     Tuesday, November 13, 2012 at 8:00pm
Where     Copley Hall Copley Formal Lounge 

Literature enthusiasts have gathered in Dorset for the 20th conference run by the Thomas Hardy Society.

A programme of talks, seminars, walks and music events is being held to celebrate the poet and writer who lived near Dorchester for most of his life.

Thomas Hardy Society secretary Mike Nixon said the eight-day conference was "a balance of the academic and the local" and was important for boosting tourism.

Delegates are discussing aspects of Hardy's life and literature, from the wildlife in his books to his opinions on international politics.

Mr Nixon said television adaptations and film versions of Hardy classics were boosting interest in the writer and drawing more visitors to the area.
'Interesting opportunity'

Among the speakers has been Posy Simmonds whose graphic novel Tamara Drew has been turned into a film.

With delegates from a record 15 countries attending, organisers have highlighted Thomas Hardy's growth in popularity in countries where English is not the first language.

Russian PhD student Elena Elenev said it was a "tremendously interesting opportunity" to visit the place which was the inspiration for Hardy's fictional town of Casterbridge.

"For a small town with such a rich history, it is so well preserved. Everyone is so absolutely enthusiastic," she said.

Keith Wilson from Ottawa in Canada is a regular visitor to the biennial conference.

"Every conference leads to a developing understanding of Hardy and with so many post grad students now coming to the conference, it's vital for the future development of studies of Hardy.

"One of the nicest things is the mix of academics and lay-enthusiasts whose knowledge is just immense," he said.

Mr Nixon said it was important to attract local people to the conference events as, in the past, the town had an ambivalent relationship with the author who had a reputation for being remote.

"Dorchester always had a slightly odd relationship with Hardy, especially among the older families who knew him.

"But as Dorchester has expanded, many new people have come to the town because of a love of Hardy."

He said the "Hardy country" brand was boosting tourism in the same way Bath and West Yorkshire benefited from connections with Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.

There was plenty to sample as the Melbourne Writers Festival got under way.

A VIBRANT literary culture demands a plurality of voices and that's exactly what this official Unesco City of Literature got over the first weekend of the Melbourne Writers Festival.

You could have sampled the intellect and wit of a cabal of The New Yorker writers, artists and editors; novelists, journalists and poets from Africa, Europe and Australia; people who write narrative non-fiction, crime fiction, biography, long novels and short, tweets and sonnets.

You could have been taken to the dramatised readings of Charles Dickens with Simon Callow; the hardscrabble territory of northern New South Wales and the showjumping circuit of the '30s with Gillian Mears; Papua New Guinea with Drusilla Modjeska, or Gallipoli and the battlefields of France with Tom Keneally.

You could have walked the streets of Melbourne, paced the halls of the National Gallery of Victoria, mulled over the political imperative in contemporary fiction, the predicament of the ALP, celebrated the genius of Patrick White, and pondered the nature of our relationship with the animal world. Andrew Motion confessed that being Poet Laureate for 10 years and having to write on demand ''fatally disturbed the balance of the creative mind''.

When he accepted the gig back in 1999 he decided to turn it into an ambassadorial post for poetry: ''I ended up feeling glad to have done it but, boy, was I glad to give it up.'' Over the past couple of years he thought he'd killed himself as a poet and almost gave up, but said with some relief that he had managed to resurrect himself.

There could surely be no more enthusiastic writer than Keneally. His near love for his latest leading ladies - the two sisters whom he dispatches as nurses to Gallipoli and beyond in The Daughters of Mars - was palpable; it was as if he were talking about real people, which to him they probably are.

He hardly let his interlocutor, novelist David Francis, get in a word until 25 minutes into their chat. His fascination with war - ''even though I'm a pacifist'' - perhaps stemmed from his father's absence for three years during World War II, but his own solitary encounter with its horrors was on one of his trips to Eritrea around the time he wrote Towards Asmara. What he saw appalled him: ''I make Woody Allen look like a stalwart soul.''

Readers always like to know how a writer creates and the organic element of the process seems to come as a surprise. As it does to the writers themselves at times.

Mears, for example said she hadn't known when she introduced a piebald mare called Magpie halfway through Foal's Bread that she would become the hero horse of the book; Keneally said he conjured up his two nurses first ''and then put a bit of business between them'' to see where it went.

What Andy Carvin writes can't really be described as organic, but it certainly emerges organically. He's the man who tweeted the Arab Spring, or perhaps that should be retweeted.

He described the experience during the uprising in Egypt when so many people were tweeting ''as a collective intelligence coming to him''.

He likened his situation to being in a helicopter hovering about Tahrir Square.

Ironically, when he finally did go to Cairo and was caught up in a tear-gas attack he had no real idea what was going on. It was only when he extricated himself later and looked at the many tweets that he managed to get a more complete picture. He argued that the only way for the news media to innovate was to experiment and that's where social media tools come in.

The Melbourne Writers festival continues until Sunday. mwf.com.au. The Age is a festival sponsor.

The English translation of a Bengali children's novel by author Sunil Gangopadhyay has made it to the biennial International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) Honour List 2012.

The coveted Honour diploma was handed over to Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee for his translation of Gangopadhyay’s The Dreadful Beauty as part of IBBY International Congress celebrations at the Imperial College in London.

Published by Ponytale Books, the novel was selected as an outstanding, recently published book, for the quality of its translation and for being representative of best in children’s literature from India and suitable for publication throughout the world.

This is the first ever international recognition for an Indian children’s book where a translation from an Indian language into English has been commended by IBBY, the publishers said.

IBBY, a non-profit organization which represents an international network of people from all over the world who are committed to bringing books and children together, aims to promote international understanding through children's books.

The Dreadful Beauty was originally written in Bengali as Bhoyonkor Sundor by eminent Bengali litterateur Sunil Gangopadhyay.

The book contains the first adventure of Kakababu, an anti-thesis of a conventional detective, who has found a place for himself in the pantheon of Bengali fictional detective characters.

"I strongly believe that there are excellent books for children and young adults in Bengali which need to be projected on a national and international platform," Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee said.

"If the selection of my translation in the IBBY Honour List motivates more people to undertake the task of translation in this area, I will feel my effort rewarded," Bhattacharjee added.

"It is indeed an honour for our young publishing house to get this global recognition. We are all the more delighted since this is the first ever nomination of a translation of a book from an Indian language into English nominated from India," said Pranav Kumar Singh, publisher, Ponytale Books.

Ponytale Books has also published Sobuj Dwiper Raja (The King of the Verdant Island) and is in the process of bringing out Pahad Churay Atank (Terror on Mountain Top), Jongoler Modhye Hotel (Mystery of the Hotel in the Jungle) and Khali Jahajer Rohosyo (Mystery of the Empty Ship) for readers in Englsh. (IBNS)