Covering the Writers Festival online

Pavlov's Cat's comment on my recent post has prodded me into getting off my proverbial and posting an update on the Writers Festival. I've spent far too long stewing on Nam Le's and Salman Rushdie's session on Sunday night, so I should get cracking and put fingers to keyboard and post on them. Soon. I promise.

Meanwhile, a number of other writers are posting and writing on the Melbourne Writers Festival. Travel blogger Hackpacker posted briefly on last Sunday's session by David Sedaris. It was quite humourous by all accounts.

I'm waiting, hopefully, for Melbourne editor, writer and blogger Sophie Cunningham to post on her Festival experiences soon. I enjoyed her interview with Nam Le on Sunday evening. Meanwhile, you can see the lovely pages Sophie typeset and printed, from which she'll be reading two poems by Anna Akhmatova at the reading at St Paul's Cathedral this Sunday for the Festival.

Meanwhile, Gen at reeling and writhing also lists other bloggers posting on the Festival.

A Melbourne writer and review whom I know, Gillian Essex, is reviewing a number of sessions at the Writers Festival and the reviews are being published on the Melbourne Writers Festival website. Unfortunately, rather than publishing the reviews as web pages, the Festival media people, in all their rather strange wisdom, are publishing the reviews as PDFs for download. Duh. The best thing about this though is that the reviews are insightful and delightful. The reviews can be downloaded here.

Despite the relatively archaic option of publishing PDFs, it is good that the MWF team has taken steps to embracing the web. However, it doesn't really compare to such achievements as the Adelaide Festival of Ideas being blogged – with official encouragement – by Adelaide bloggers such as Pavlov's Cat.

Perhaps next year the Melbourne Writers Festival will formally support bloggers to cover the event, or publish its own blog. I'm putting my hand up for that.

If you know of anyone else covering the Festival online, do let me know so I can compile a post on them.

Update
Retailer Readings Books Music Film, one of the sponsors and official bookseller of the Writers Festival, also has a festival blog on their website. It looks like their blogger is the editor of their newsletter. [Updated Thursday 28 August 12:25 pm]

[Image by Andrew_1000 (cc)]