In a dramatic leap from winter to spring, Canberra Writers Festival launches into its ninth year with an emphasis on passion.

Beejay Silcox, director of the festival for the second year, is certain the new springtime programming will bring about a huge change, which means Canberrans will be the first readers in the country to get access to new books.

“When the festival was in August, it was the end of the publishing calendar, so it meant that we were the last festival of the year, but now we are the first festival of the year,” she tells me. 

“This is the national capital and this is where the national conversation begins, so it’s a real way of reflecting the city back to itself.”

Determined that the festival be more user-friendly and more community-focused, she wanted the opening to be big and democratic so has programmed a prequel launch by Tim Winton of his new dystopian novel, Juice, and a big noisy opening event called What If? in Kings Hall, Old Parliament House, on October 23. 

She has inherited the festival’s tagline since its inception, Power Politics Passion, and she is happily running with it, “but what I really want to do is to focus on the passion aspect,” Silcox says. 

Passionate writers and their consumer-readers will have their choice of 79 events showcasing more than 100 writers and thinkers, nearly half of them from Canberra region. More than 80 new books will be on parade.

Any self-respecting festival, she believes, must put First Nations writers upfront, and to that end, 20 per cent of the content features First Nations writers.

Amy Mcquire is a case in point. A fearless young journalist who cut her teeth in the National Indigenous Times while living and working in Canberra, she will be holding a session on her book, Black Witness.

Anita Heiss will discuss her new novel Dirrayawadha, set during the Bathurst Wars as part of a live recording for The Garret literary podcast.

Melissa Lucashenko joins forces with Nardi Simpson to discuss Continuity and Connection.

Best of all, answering criticisms of past festivals, as part of the First Nations Narrative section, there will be a session called Send in the Poets, featuring four First Nations poets, including Jeanine Leane, Elfie Shiosaki and Cheryl Leavy.

Also new on the program is Queerstories, curated by Maeve Marsden and featuring five storytellers. 

Front and centre will be a line-up of Canberra authors, two of whom were on hand at the National Library recently for a festival launch. 

Canberra author, Kaaron Warren, lauded for her horror fiction, has taken a step into speculative crime fiction in a new book, The Underhistory.

Warren tells me it came from finding, in a Canberra sale, a set of postcards from the 1930s which piqued her interest. The author turned out to be William Ashton, artist and director of the National Art Gallery of NSW from 1937 to 1943.

The plot thickened when Warren’s researches at the National Library and later MoAD revealed that years after his death, Ashton’s second wife had been murdered by a serial- killer. A gift to a storyteller, it gave the impetus for a new novel that she calls “more crimey than usual, with less horror”.

Another local writer with a difference is Qin Qin, who now works at the National Library. A first-generation Chinese Australian, she started out as a “model minority” child who studied hard, took music lessons and later won a scholarship to Harvard.

But she went off the rails, became a high school teacher, discovered her love of writing and eventually contacted public intellectual Benjamin Law, not knowing that he was also a literary scout for Hachette. 

The title of Qin Qin’s memoir tells it all – Model Minority Gone Rogue: How an unfulfilled daughter of a tiger mother went way off script. 

Other local legends will be in the festival lineup, including Chris Hammer, recent ACT Book of the Year winner, environmentalist David Lindemayer, ANU historian Frank Bongiorno and south-coast writer Inga Simpson.

Political debate is far from forgotten. Barrie Cassidy will lead a panel on the subject Democracy on a Precipice; Lucia Osborne-Crowley, in conversation with Karen Middleton, will give an inside look at the Ghislaine Maxwell trial through her book, The Lasting Harm; Rick Morton will tell Michael Williams the story of Robodebt, and, just ahead of the US elections, Fred C. Trump III, nephew to Donald Trump, will trace his impressions of growing up in Trumpland. 

Canberra Writers Festival, October 23-27.