Day Four - Mildura Writers Festival

Sunday with David Malouf at the annual lecture as well as an amazing lunch to follow upon our presentations and amusing questions to conclude the festival.

The lecture with David was powerful and very thought provoking in what is needed for a young writer to begin and how to create their writing. I found David incredibly inspiring in the way he spoke of his journey as a writer and how his work came about creation throughout the world. He has a way of taking a million words, summarising them into emotions and directly relating to what the audience wants to hear and say. In the best way possible of course. The lecture concluded and we were headed to the festival and finale lunch.

The luncheon was very sophisticated and casual to mingle amongst the writers and talk with them on a personal level. Presentations took place with a lot of laughter and some interaction with authors and writers as well as awards being presented to accompany their certificates.

The awards took place and at Stefano's Restaurant  27 Deakin, where we ate at a long table as a group together after our journey of the festival. It was a good time for us all to speak about our interpretations of the festival overall and particularly about our time spent with David Malouf.

Concluding our luncheon ceremony, we had an opportunity to meet personally with Sunil Yapa and Nick Gadd to speak with them about writing, where it's going, what questions we had to ask them and for them to also get to know each of us individually. Before our guests arrived, the majority of us were making the most out of the opportunity to conduct our own report and interview on the stage that was left assembled at the front of the room to run a little wild and get a thrill out of watching our own impersonation with comical improvised sketches before the authors arrived.

Sunil wanted to see what we all had to offer ... our names, our writing experiences so far and ... our spirit animals! This was a fantastic opportunity to bring up some different and individual concepts with the writers and discuss further interest points as well as encourage future writing. Sunil opted for me to check out Poetry Slams as I mentioned I was into rap music and was constantly thinking about how rap and hip hop can be classed as poetry and how I can learn from that.



Overall, an amazing ending to a brilliant festival with an extremely generous amount to offer in a very unique art form.