The absolute highlight of the Sydney Writers’ Festival for me is the fabulous Redrooms Disappearing Walking Tour. I can’t express how much I love The Red Room Company, they are easily the most innovative and exciting poetry organisation in Australia (if not the most innovative and exciting writing organisation) and we are so luckily to have them here in Sydney. This is a must see (and free)!

I love locative work and love work that goes beyond the traditional. Of course readings are great when you sit down and listen to them but work like this is what we need more of.

David Ryding 

Director

Uncover Sydney’s hidden poetic currents on The Disappearing Walking Tour. Your guide to fragmentary histories and vanishing locations, The Red Room Company’s Johanna Featherstone, will take you on an exploration of poetry and place. Celebrated poets Martin Harrison, Astrid Lorange and Nick Bryant-Smith will meet you along the way. Plus, be among the first to witness The Disappearing, an innovative new app for iPhone, iPad and Android that uses geolocation technology to match work by Australia’s best poets to the world around us.

At this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival the NSW Writers’ Centre presents The Forest for the Trees – Writers & Publishing in 2012  (SOLD OUT): A one-day writers seminar looking at the publishing world right now.

The Forest for the Trees will provide emerging writers with an introduction to getting published as well as engaging writers of any level with discussion and debate on where the writer world is in 2012.

Over a packed day this seminar will go from lectures to conversations to panel sessions (and back again). The Forest for the Trees will look at the last year for publishers, bookshops, and for the writer. The here and now of digital and alternative publishing will be discussed as will a snap shot of the challenges that publishers are facing. Journal editors will discuss where they are at, as well authors discussing the challenges of getting a book to print and the difference with the overseas writing world. The day will end with a look ahead from a writer, publisher, agent, and bookseller as well as an open question and answer session.