Begin the Festival with readings from four outstanding Blue Mountains authors spanning poetry, non-fiction, literary fiction, history and memoir. For visitors, this event provides the perfect opportunity to discover the depth of talent nurtured in the region. For locals, it’s a chance to connect with fellow artists and celebrate the creativity of our community.

Presented in partnership with MTNS MADE.

Cosy up in The Carrington Lounge for a live broadcast by ABC Radio Sydney of Saturday Mornings, with host and Blue Mountains local Rae Johnston. Bring the weekend to life with an incredible roster of festival guests, offering a rich mix of music, culture, food, science and smart conversation, with curious minds, local voices and inspiring ideas.

Don’t miss conversations with headliners, debut authors, locals, internationals and more.

As Sydney grapples with rising housing costs, closing venues and generational divides, three writers turn a sharp eye on the city. Fiona Wright's satire Kill Your Boomers follows a share-house scheme to stay afloat; Max Easton's Now Autonomy charts vanishing counterculture; Yumna Kassab's Parramatta: A Dictionary of Place and Memory maps history and gentrification. Hosted by Fiona Kelly McGregor.

Phillipa McGuinness hosts four celebrated authors reflecting on The Library That Made Me, a collection marking 200 years of the State Library of NSW. Bruce Pascoe, Ellen van Neerven, Yumna Kassab and Roanna Gonsalves share memories of libraries as places of learning and connection, tracing how these institutions evolved from vetted, women-excluded spaces into today's thriving cultural hubs.

“What happens to the marriage plot in the era of monsterf*cking novels?” writes Olivia Murphy for the Sydney Review of Books. From interspecies romance to the rising divorce rate, there are more than a few challenges to our popular conception of marriage as the end goal of a classic love story.

Join Kris Kneen and Andrew Pippos, as much passionate readers as they are writers, for a discussion of the role marriage plays in contemporary literature, popular conceptions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, and how their own work engages with love and marriage in interesting ways.