WRITING ABOUT WOMEN, WRITING ABOUT WAR - SYDNEY WRITERS FESTIVAL 2026

Writing about women, writing about war: Barbara Demick, Sofi Oksanen, Maria Reva and Maria Tumarkin, SWF 2026

Maria Tumarkin opened this electrifying session on women, war and writing by honouring the late Ukrainian poet, novelist and human rights activist Victoria Amelina and her posthumously published book Looking at Women, Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary (2025). Dedicating the session to her memory, Tumarkin took time to reflect on the significance of Amelina’s work and the tragedy of her untimely death: she died in hospital on 1 July 2023 after being severely injured in a Russian missile strike on the pizzeria where she’d been dining.

Before she died Amelina had been working on a manuscript she’d begun after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Given she’d completed some 60 per cent of it, her husband Alex Amelin and three friends decided to finish it so they could fulfil Amelina’s desire to bring stories about Ukrainian women documenting war crimes to the world, in order ‘to uncover the truth, ensure the survival of memory, and give justice and lasting peace a chance’. Justice and legal accountability were critical for Amelina. As she told a friend in June 2022:

‘I want to write, and I’m thinking whether I can, a book of reportage on those who are documenting the war … I am especially interested in those who document war crimes with the goal of holding the perpetrators accountable.’

Hanya Yanagihara on To Paradise, Sydney Writers' Festival 2022

Hanya Yanagihara on To Paradise, SWF 2022

On Friday 20 May 2022, the City Recital Hall at Sydney’s Angel Place was buzzing. When acclaimed, much loved New York novelist Hanya Yanagihara finally appeared, the crowd exploded.

Yanagihara and SBS journalist Anton Enus have been in conversation together before, so their talk was easy, cheeky, brilliant. First they complimented each other’s clothes: her black dress and sparkly silver slippers, his gold and red shirt. Enus reminded us that Yanagihara is not just the author of bestselling sensation A Little Life (2015) – and now To Paradise (2022) – but also has a big day job, as editor of T, the New York Times Style Magazine.

When Enus opened by asking Yanagihara about her choice to write such challenging novels, she calmly replied, Readers should be made to work. It’s a great act of vulnerability to open the book and go where the writer tells you.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong’s first book, the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), circles obsessively around fathers. (Vuong’s violent father left soon after the family – grandmother, mother, father, son – arrived in Hartford, Connecticut, from Saigon via a refugee camp in the Philippines when Vuong was two years old.)

In its middle is a four-page poem called ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’, which opens like this:

Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand to your chest.

After war, with violence and trauma in our bodies, what happens to love? How do we connect, body to body?

See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse by Jess Hill

Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse (2019) is a wide-ranging examination of love, power, the perpetrators of domestic abuse and the systems that enable them. It won the 2020 Stella Prize, was made into a 3-part SBS documentary and is essential reading. Domestic abuse is a national emergency:

‘In Australia, a country of almost 25 million people, one woman a week is killed by a man she’s been intimate with. These statistics tell us something that’s almost impossible to grapple with: it’s not the monster lurking in the dark women should fear, but the men they fall in love with.’

Hill’s book is beautifully written, forensically researched, comprehensive and excellent. It puts domestic abuse in its historical context and canvasses a vast, complicated and ever changing terrain …

The Undying: A meditation on modern illness by Anne Boyer

Anne Boyer’s The Undying is one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read. I read it so slowly: it took me from early April until the end of June. Boyer is a poet and her prose is dense and resonant as poetry. It’s so loaded with … meaning? Undoing of meaning?

That this book is impossible to race through is one of its great virtues. In this and many other ways, it’s a perfect text for pandemic 2020: it forces you to slow down, to be deeply attentive and considerate, and, in particular, it brings home to you the fierce reality of a body in pain – and of the life-saving and life-destroying powers of the modern medical and pharmaceutical industries, their ruthless, violent, cost-minimising service to late capitalism in this age of digital media, data and screens.

new book, booksJane Gleeson-WhiteSeptember 17, 2020illness, cancer, The Undying, Anne Boyer, poetry, poet, nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize, pain, writing, women's writing

A House in Norway by Vigdis Hjorth

How different this year looks from the one I sketched onto the calendar on the wall above my desk in January. I was supposed to be giving a keynote in Oslo in March and speaking at a sustainability conference at Yale the following week, as well as speaking at various local writers’ festivals about the new edition of Six Capitals. Needless to say, all conferences and festivals have been postponed indefinitely.

The best thing about the cancelled Oslo-Yale trip was that in preparing for Oslo I read my first Norwegian novel in at least a decade: Vigdis Hjorth’s A House in Norway (2014).

books, new bookJane Gleeson-WhiteAugust 24, 2020fiction, Norway, A House in Norway, Vigdis Hjorth, literature, novel, women's writing

There's a new updated paperback edition of Six Capitals out in May 2020

I’m happy to say that a new, fully revised and updated paperback edition of Six Capitals is being published in May 2020 by Allen & Unwin. It seems very timely.

As I write we’re getting stark lessons in how important our communities and beautiful green and blue places are. We must value them in our economic, accounting, financial and legal systems. The new edition of Six Capitals updates the story of four movements that are designed to do just that - to value people and the planet.

Welcome to my new blog

Welcome to my new blog, where I’ll be writing about books I’m reading, art I’m seeing and other meanderings. My last book (Six Capitals) put me in touch with rich and powerful men and women who wanted to care about the natural world and the wellbeing of people, but their thinking seemed to default to returns on financial investments, profits and economic growth. It was as if they could imagine no other way. I’m partly grateful to have had the opportunity to have gone so deep into the belly of the beast of global capitalism, it was certainly clarifying - and partly appalled that I got lost there for so long. Perhaps I spoke the language of mainstream economics too well.

new bookJane Gleeson-WhiteFebruary 5, 2019Jane Gleeson-White, Six Capitals, mothers, mother tongue

location

123 Fake Street

London N00 00N, UK

Contact

template.placeholder@example.com

+44 512 5550110

Follow