Newcastle Writers Festival this weekend—come one, come all!

Newcastle (NSW, Australia) is having its first writers' festival this weekend, and it's going to be a juicy one. Here is the program. If Anita Heiss, Michael Chamberlain, Jane Caro and David Marr aren't enough for you, come along and see me, too. I'll be on:

• at 11.15 a.m. on Saturday in the Lock-Up Cultural Centre (in the Gallery), with Felicity Pulman and Alexa Moses, being wrangled by Kaz Delaney, talking about "why Young Adult fiction isn't just for teens" on the Crossing Over panel
• at 1.30 p.m. on Sunday in the Hunter Room at the City Hall, on the Dreaming Australia panel. Russell Blackford will be there making sure that Janeen Webb and I get a word in edgewise alongside the ebullient Jack Dann, as we celebrate home-grown speculative fiction.

I also hope to sneak off and visit the Treasures of Newcastle from the Macquarie Era exhibition at the Newcastle Art Gallery, because, you know, history? (Here's the Macquarie collector's chest from 1818.)