Scribe authors at Byron Writers Festival 2025

There is an old Buddhist adage: the teachings are like a finger pointing to the moon. To achieve enlightenment, you are not supposed to look at the finger. You are supposed to look to the celestial light.

I am asking you to look at the finger. The finger is also the moon.

A tilted head. A finger to the lips. A wave that could mean emphasis or dismissal. A raised palm of piety and fellowship.

Our gestures do not simply point to our thoughts, they are our thoughts made flesh. They can be instinctive, intuitive, or calculated — or all three. They exist in the briefest moment and through history, in a gently turned wrist and across whole nations.

Our gestures drag stories with them, whether they mean to or not. They are invitations to think about how our worlds are larger than they seem — how we are much larger than we seem.

Join award-winning philosopher Damon Young — author of The Art of Reading and Philosophy in the Garden — as he sheds light on thirteen curious gestures. Drawing equally from classical poetry and science-fiction, heavy metal and ballet, Young illuminates our varied humanity from prehistory to today.

Josh Bornstein asks how our major corporations have come to exercise repressive control over the lives of their employees, and explores what can be done to repair the greatest threat to democracy — the out-of-control corporation.

When you go to work, you agree to exchange your labour in exchange for your pay packet, right? Actually, you may not realise it, but you are also selling your rights to free speech and to participate in democracy. Welcome to corporate cancel culture, a burgeoning phenomenon that is routinely ignored in debates about free speech. If you work for a large company, it will not allow you to say or do anything that harms its brand — at or outside work. If you transgress and attract controversy — whether for cracking a joke, a Facebook like, or a political post on TikTok, you can be shamed, sacked, and blacklisted.

In the twenty-first century, major corporations have become the most powerful institution in the world — more powerful than many nations. That unchecked, anti-democratic power is reflected in the gaming of the political system, the weakening of governments, and the repressive control of the lives of employees. While their behaviour has deteriorated, corporations have invested heavily in ethically washed brands, claiming to be saving the planet and doing good. As Josh Bornstein argues, we would not tolerate a government that censored, controlled, and punished us in this way, so why do we meekly accept the growing authoritarianism of the companies that we work for?

Introducing a bold new voice — one of the most exciting short-story writers working in comics today.

A coworker-turned-prospective-lover confesses a hard-to-swallow fetish. A train ride fantastically goes off the rails. Cousins revisit summer holiday bliss — or was it really horror? Exes fumble an attempt to reconnect over a dip in the pool. And an expectant mother slips into uncharted territory as she enters a communion more pure than language can accommodate.

I Ate the Whole World to Find You maps the topography of trauma, treasures, and loss imposed onto the body of Jenny, a twenty-something-going-on-thirty-something partial hot mess who’s making her way more firmly into adulthood. As she navigates friendship, family, and romantic relationships, will her inability to communicate destroy her, or ultimately be her rebirth?

Set against an exquisitely lush Australian backdrop, Rachel Ang’s pencils are fluid yet scratchy, precise and evocative, bringing to life the inner and external world of Jenny with stunning realism and gushing imagination. Sprinkled with speculative fiction and fantasy, this radiant debut collection establishes Ang as a storyteller of range and power.

A follow-up to the author’s prescient bestseller, first published in 1982, that alerted the public to the likely impacts of information technologies and the emergence of a post-industrial society.

When Sleepers, Wake! was  released in Australia, it immediately became influential around the world: it was read by Deng Xiaoping and Bill Gates; was published in China, Japan, South Korea, and Sweden; and led to the author being the first Australian minister invited to address a G-7 summit meeting, held in Canada in 1985.

Now its author, the polymath and former politician Barry Jones, turns his attention to what has happened since — especially to politics, health, and our climate in the digital age — and to the challenges faced by increasingly fragile democracies and public institutions.

Jones sees climate change as the greatest problem of our time, but political leaders have proved incapable of dealing with complex, long-term issues of such magnitude. The Trump phenomenon overturns the whole concept of critical thinking and analysis. Meanwhile, technologies such as the smartphone and the ubiquity of social media have reinforced the realm of the personal. This has weakened our sense of, or empathy with, ‘the other’, the remote, and the unfamiliar, and all but destroyed our sense of community, of being members of broad, inclusive groups. The COVID-19 threat, which was immediate, and personal, showed that some leaders could respond courageously, while others denied the evidence.

In the post-truth era, politicians invent ‘facts’ and ignore or deny the obvious, while business and the media are obsessed with marketing and consumption for the short term. What Is to Be Done is a long-awaited work from Jones on the challenges of modernity and what must be done to meet them.