State Library flagged as extra venue for the Sydney Writers’ Festival

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Sydney Writers’ Festival is set to be granted a bigger year-round presence at Australia’s oldest library with the opening of a 350-seat auditorium at the State Library of NSW.

Arts Minister John Graham said he wants the Library to throw open its doors to writers’ groups, book launches and reader conferences in a much bigger way than it does.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival, in particular, needed to feel as if the Library “is a home to them on a permanent basis”.

Caroline Butler-Bowden, the newly appointed State Librarian.Credit: James Brickwood

This did not mean that the festival would leave Carriageworks for its week-long celebrations in May but the Library could potentially become a venue for outside author events during the rest of the year.

“How that plays out administratively, we’ll wait until we have a new librarian in place,” he said.

Caroline Butler-Bowden, an acting deputy secretary at Transport for NSW and a former curator, has been named as the Library’s new chief, taking over next month from Dr John Vallance when he retires after six years.

Butler-Bowden said she was interested in programming and a partnership with writers’ festivals that matched and grew the mission of the library.

“So I welcome that conversation, and obviously, books and culture ideas have been at the heart of this place,” she said. “Any partnership with the festival would also need to work for “western Sydney and regionally. The great value of the State Library is its statewide brief.”

So far this year, it has staged nine additional writers’ talks, including that of cosy crime writer Richard Osman.

Arts Minister John Graham flags a bigger presence for the Sydney Writers’ Festival at the State Library of NSW.Credit: Rhett Wyman

The library’s new auditorium potentially presents a solution to the festival’s challenge of finding suitable venues at a time when the cost of staging cultural festivals is dramatically rising and revenue is not keeping up.

Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre runs its year-long program of events promoting stories, ideas, and writers out of the State Library of Victoria.

Graham said he was not “trying to recreate the Wheeler Centre in Sydney, but it’s a step towards the role the Wheeler Centre plays where it’s a place of discussion, a place for writers”.

“Writers’ festivals are very important once a year,” he said. “Where do writers and readers obviously gather for the rest of the year round?

“Gleebooks, and some of the bookstores play an important role, but really there is not a permanent home or place where people feel at home, as far as those reading and writing communities, and I want the State Library to play that role over time.”

Sydney Writers’ Festival chief executive Brooke Webb, said she was excited to explore with the library what possibilities there might be to connect authors with audiences all year round.

SWF sold 57,000 tickets across six precincts during its last festival week, with 4000 people coming to Carriageworks alone.

Butler-Bowden comes to the library as an author, having co-written an illustrated history of the tram network and a history of the architecture of apartment buildings in Australia written with help from the library’s Mitchell Reading Room.

A curator for 20 years first at the Art Gallery of NSW and then at Sydney Living Museums, Butler-Bowden has spent the last four years trying to improve the walkability of cities. She was awarded a Churchill fellowship in 2017 to look at visitor accessibility to heritage sites in England and Scotland.

Opening up the library as a community space and more diverse audiences will be one of her priorities.

In transport, she was a member of the steering committee for the East Macquarie Street Precinct, a plan that aims to transform a collection of heritage buildings, including the library, into a civic boulevard that prioritises people, arts and culture. There was always more that could be done to knit the Library into a streetscape, she said.

“Parks and libraries are at the very bedrock and heart of the best democracies, cities and states, and we need to value our libraries and continue to build them because they are open to everyone,” she said.

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