26 MAY 2023 Melbourne Writers Festival

Students from Kolbe Catholic College had the opportunity to have an excursion at the State Library in Melbourne, to witness and be a part of the ‘Writers festival.’ Students experienced meeting authors and scriptwriters, such as Tom Taylor, Nova Weetman, Lili Wilkinson and Kay Kerr. This excursion gave students the experience of meeting published authors, to learn about the world of writing, publishing and to explore creativity within themselves.

Tom Taylor is a New York Times bestselling author, who has worked with DC Comics, assisted in writing Suicide Squad, X-Men, Injustice, DCeased and many others. He is also the co-creator of the new Netflix and ABC series, The Deep. His session ‘Ask Me Anything’ consisted of secondary school students asking him questions, as he answered, then gave them the experience of taking photos with him, signing books bought at the event, and giving them a good laugh.

Nova Weetman, the author of The Edge of Thirteen and Sick Bay shared her ideas and advice about how to create a thriving, interesting main character in her session ‘Main Character Energy’, which included students in creating a character of their own, and exploring the ways of how to create a story. This interactive experience helped young teenagers to work with others, and to build their own protagonist in someone else's narrative.

Lili Wilkinson, an author whose world is filled with fantasy and magic, recently published A Hunger of Thorns. It was an honor to meet her, as she gave well thought-out advice on what really creates a story, genre, and novel structure – not to mention interesting characters and a sparkly, magical feel in all her writing. Throughout all of the Writers Festival, she really added a mystical and other-worldly twist to it.

Kay Kerr is an autistic author, known for her novels Social Queues, Please Dont Hug Me, and her new, non-fiction book Love and Autism. She really gave students the insight of life as an autistic woman, and talked about how love clashes in the mix. Love is a difficult, confusing thing, whether it be platonic or romantic, and she really went into depth about how that differs in her everyday life.

Students had the chance to purchase novels, and get them signed as they also got to meet each individual author to take photos and videos. It was a great chance for them to meet new people, and getting to know exactly how famous authors get inspiration to write. We would like to thank Ms Ibrido and all English teachers for inviting us to experience this wonderful excursion and Ms Board for organising it all for us!

“Personally I really enjoyed the writers festival because of the fact that we got to meet amazing authors and got to workshop with them. I felt like it was an opportunity for us to improve our writing abilities and to create stories from our own perspective.” - Gia

“As for me, I found the excursion to be a good chance to travel out to the city with friends. It was also thrilling for me as I hope to someday pursue being an author and journalist – so this was something I was very much looking forward to.” - Frankie

Written by Year 10 Students Frankie Massa and Gia Alphonso