Digging In – Adelaide gets a brand new Festival!

The Festival State is about to get a brand new Festival. Rose Wight OAM has joined forces with Penelope Curtin to present ‘The Body in the Garden – a crime and garden writers’ festival' to be held in Adelaide's beautiful Botanic Garden over the weekend of 25-27 October 2013.

This unique Festival is in keeping with South Australia's long tradition of arts innovation and represents the first of its kind in Australia with both women having had an extensive history of involvement in the arts and event management. Wight received her OAM in 2009 for service to the Arts while Curtin has reached prominence in a variety of roles within the local and national Literature scene with senior positions at Arts SA and directing the 'South Australian Food and Wine Writers' Festival' through to running her own bookshop and enjoying a successful career as a professional editor.

With input from an advisory committee Wight and Curtin have employed the services of 22 writers from Australia and overseas. Included in the Programme are the internationally renown Swedish crime writer Hakan Nesser and the UK's Toby Musgrave, a graduate of Reading University's Department of Horticulture and a leading International authority on garden history and design, along with Anne Cleeves who is the inaugural winner of the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award – the world's richest crime writers' prize. Although Cleeves is probably best known in Australia for the TV series Vera based on her Vera Stanhope novels.

Local writers at the Festival include “Australia's first lady of crime” (the 2002 Ned Kelly Award winner for Best Crime Novel, Death Delights) Gabrielle Lord and acclaimed author and landscape designer Paul Bangay.

Wight and Curtin said, “Adelaide, the ideal festival city because of its convenience and compact size, also boasts one of the oldest botanic gardens in Australia – an idyllic and apt location for this festival.”

Due to its idiosyncratic nature and confluence of ideas this Festival is likely to draw a new and interested audience to the usual Festival goers, Literature and True Crime aficionados as well as gardening enthusiasts.

The full programme for the Festival will be released in September.