• 26 February-1 March: Perth. Perth Writers Festival
• 28 February –5 March: Adelaide. Writers Week
• 6-8 March: Dublin. Dublin Book Festival
• 12-14 March: Tucson, AZ, USA. Tucson Festival of Books
• 15-19 March: Mudgeeraba, Queensland. Somerset Celebration of Literature
• 17-19 March: Bullcreek, WA. All Saints Lit Fest of Young Adult and Children’s Literature
• 20-21 March: Faulconbridge, NSW. Norman Lindsay Festival of Children’s Literature
• 1-5 April. Perth. Swancon : WA Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention
• 14-16 May: Darwin. Wordstorm 2010
• 12-16 May: Auckland. Auckland Writers and Readers Festival
• 17-23 May: Sydney. Sydney Writers Festival
• 21-30 May: Melbourne. Emerging Writers Festival
• 15-18 July: Mildura, Victoria. Mildura Writers Festival
• 6-8 August: Byron Bay, NSW. Byron Bay Writers Festival
• 14-30 August: Edinburgh. Edinburgh Book Festival
• 1-5 September. Brisbane. Brisbane Writers Festival
• 2-6 September: Melbourne. AussieCon4 – World Science Fiction Convention
• 8-12 September. Santiago de Compostela, Spain. IBBY 32 Congress
• 27 September-1 October. Brisbane. SLAQ/IASL Conference, with a literature strand
• late October. Dates to be confirmed. Waiheke Island, Auckland NZ. Words on a Small Island. Read about the inaugural festival.
• 6-10 October. Ubud, Bali. Ubud Writers Festival

Please note that not all of the above websites contain 2010 content, although the dates are correct at the time of publication.

Oh for the Lotto life!

Image of The Bookman from The Gnome King of Oz (1927) used under Creative Commons licence

Patrick Ness, Kate De Goldi, Angie Sage, Morris Gleitzman, Garth Nix, Andy Griffiths and Mark Walden … some of the writers for young people we will enjoy at the 2010 Perth Writers Festival.

The full Arts Festival (PIAF) program was unveiled yesterday. Earmark Friday 26 February to Monday 1 March for the literature component, with the traditional free Family Fun Day taking place on Sunday 28 February. This is a long weekend in WA.

PIAF runs from 5 February to 1 March.

Thanks PaperTigers.

To attend in a virtual sort of way, the Twitter hashtag is #nbf. Works well in Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck.

Here’s the children’s and YA lineup and webcasts will be happening, too.

The lineup is impressive:

Andy Griffiths – Brian Falkner – Belinda Jeffrey – Colin Thompson – Charlotte McConaghy – Carole Wilkinson -  Melaina Faranda – Pat Flynn – Jackie French – Tristan Bancks – Tempany Deckert – Richard Newsome – Jack Heath – James Roy – James Moloney – Michael Gerard Bauer – Pamela Rushby – Sherryl Clark – Peter Carnavas and Scott Monk.

so if you are in the vicinity, check it out. There is a related online literature festival happening as we type for students and teachers across Australia. This one finishes on 18 September.

…cosy tales in which children’s characters looked forward to future adventures had been replaced by gritty stories that offered no hope for their weary protagonists.Contemporary literature is dauntingly bleak, with depressing endings that do little to inspire.

As someone pointed out The Road of Bones is hardly the cheeriest of reads.

But this is an argument that pops up regularly. We blogged about it a couple of months ago in a US context. Anne Fine must have known that the battle lines would be drawn.

And indeed they have. Arguments are being tossed around but not too many support her point of view. Some Welsh authors appear to, though.

Children can handle the realism, says one commentator. The horror is necessary, says another. And while we are at it,  let’s cheer up the classics.

Darkness in children’s literature has a long tradition. And the debates will continue to rage.

Here’s the lineup of writers for young people. Something of a Who’s Who for a Book Week crossover event.

You can find God in Eliot, Austen and even Philip Pullman:

He talked about the idea of the ­”daemon” – the human soul manifested in animal form in Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

“What’s fascinating about Pullman is the way the health of human beings rests on relationship with daemons … that’s almost a way of saying that a whole human being, is one in which the internal conversation is going on, the internal criticism, the internal challenges … I feel that awareness of inner conversation has to be part of sensible modern discourse about God.”

Patrick Ness, Philip Ardagh and Tanya Landman are among the speakers today. Not sure how long the files will be available for downloading though.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama will serve as Honorary Chairs of the 2009 National Book Festival, organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress. Now in its ninth year, this popular event celebrating the joys of reading and lifelong literacy …

Read on and sigh.

The heads-up came from the Joy of Childen’s Literature, for which we are both grateful and envious of our US cousins. A new slogan? ‘All the way with BO and M). C’mon Aussie, C’mon’. (Overseas readers will almost certainly need the hyperlinks here for the popular culture references).