Tim Winton, Alexis Wright, Kathy Lette among nine authors confirmed for inaugural OzLit Festival
Tim Winton, Alexis Wright, Santilla Chingaipe, Heather Morris, Kathy Lette, Evie Wyld, Intan Paramaditha, Lucia Osborne-Crowley and Laura Elizabeth Woollett have been confirmed for the inaugural OzLit Festival, celebrating Australian writing and ideas in London.
The new festival will take place at Foyles, Charing Cross Road, on Sunday 18 October. Winton will join live from Western Australia and Wright from Melbourne, with the other seven authors appearing in person at Foyles.
An initiative of FANZA (Foundation for Australian and New Zealand Arts), in partnership with the Australian High Commission and Foyles, OzLit Festival will bring together writers across fiction, history, memoir and ideas.
The festival’s inaugural theme is The Next Chapter.
Four-time Miles Franklin Award winner and twice Booker Prize-shortlisted author Tim Winton will open the festival with an exclusive OzLit Festival conversation, livestreamed from Western Australia. His appearance comes ahead of Picador’s publication of Songs from the Firefront on 5 November, a deeply personal memoir in essays about art, landscape, family, environmental loss and what we hope to pass on to future generations.
In a rare festival appearance, Alexis Wright, a Waanyi First Nations writer from the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, will join OzLit Festival live from Melbourne to discuss her latest novel, Praiseworthy, and Tracker, her collective memoir of Aboriginal leader and campaigner Tracker Tilmouth. In 2024, Praiseworthy made Wright the first author to win the Miles Franklin Award and Stella Prize in the same year, while Tracker was longlisted for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Her 1997 novel Plains of Promise will return to print in the UK and Europe in 2027.
Zambian-born Australian filmmaker, historian and author Santilla Chingaipe brings Black Convicts to OzLit. Her groundbreaking book recovers the lives of African-descended people transported to Australia and grew from research begun for her award-winning documentary Our African Roots. Shortlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize, Black Convicts will be published in the UK by Jacaranda Books on 15 October, immediately before the festival.
New Zealand-born, Australian-based author Heather Morris will appear with her new novel, The Piano Teacher of Montparnasse. Morris’s books have sold more than 19 million copies worldwide and been translated into over 50 languages. Her debut, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, became one of the bestselling books of the 21st century and was adapted for television in 2024. Inspired by a true story, her new novel follows a French Resistance operative who risks her life to protect a young Jewish girl in occupied Paris, and will be published by Firefinch on 22 October.
British-Australian author Evie Wyld is the author of four novels and one graphic novel, with work exploring violence, memory, family and landscape. Her latest novel, The Echoes, is a story of grief, intergenerational trauma and family secrets. Her honours include the Stella Prize, Miles Franklin Literary Award, Betty Trask Award, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Encore Award and European Union Prize for Literature.
Bestselling Australian author, columnist and performer Kathy Lette first made her name as a teenager with Puberty Blues, later adapted for film and television. Known for combining sharp social satire with an irreverent feminist wit, she divides her time between Sydney and London. Lette is also a television presenter and newspaper and magazine columnist, and recently completed a tour of her one-woman show, Girls’ Night Out.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a trained lawyer, legal reporter and journalist, and the author of I Choose Elena, the Somerset Maugham Award-winning My Body Keeps Your Secrets and The Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. Her forensic, trauma-informed reporting of the Maxwell trial has been widely acclaimed, and she has appeared as an expert journalist on BBC News, Sky News, LBC News and BBC Radio. Her journalism and literary writing have appeared in The Independent, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, GQ, Granta and Meanjin.
Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian author and Harvard Radcliffe Fellow. Her story collection Apple and Knife is part of the Vintage Classics Weird Girls series, while her novel The Wandering was longlisted for the Stella Prize and received the English PEN Translates Award. Her new novel, Night of a Thousand Hells, will be published by Europa Editions on 8 October. She holds a PhD from New York University, teaches at Macquarie University in Sydney and is co-founder of the feminist collective Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan.
Laura Elizabeth Woollett is an author and critic based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her short story collection, The Love of a Bad Man, was published in 2016, followed by the novels Beautiful Revolutionary (2018), The Newcomer (2021) and West Girls (2023). Her work has been listed for numerous awards, including the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. In 2025, she was a writer-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Hell Days, published by Scribe on 10 September, is her nonfiction debut.
Foyles General Manager Martin Koerner said: “I am delighted that Foyles Charing Cross Road will be hosting the inaugural OzLit Festival London. There is a rich and diverse literary culture in Australia, one which I think sometimes is a little overlooked here in the UK.
“It is my hope that in hosting this festival we can play a small part in highlighting to our customers some of the biggest and best contributors to this rich heritage, as well as looking ahead at the next generation.”
Rina Gill, Artistic Director and Co-Producer of OzLit Festival, said: “Australia’s literary culture is bold, diverse, questioning and international, and OzLit Festival reflects that extraordinary breadth and vitality.
“We hope to introduce British readers to writers they don’t yet know, offer fresh perspectives on those they do, and create a spirited, thought-provoking conversation between Australia and the UK.”
OzLit Festival is produced by Vivienne Wordley, FANZA Ambassador, and Rina Gill of Tiger Team Creative.
The full programme and ticketing details will be announced on Tuesday 1 September.