Northern Territory Writers Festival

Workshop: Writing Nonfiction Poetry to Overcome Despair with Jeanine Leane

When: Thursday 28 May 2026, 2:00pm - 4:00pm

Location: Darwin Community Arts, 1 Travers St, Coconut Grove, NT 0810, Australia

How to transform the hard stuff of life and spin it into gold? Poet, editor and creative writing teacher Jeanine Leane shares lessons learned in the writing of her recent PEN Melbourne pamphlet, Keep Words Free. In this workshop you'll learn how to write in response to a world on fire, and connect to a sense of empathy, agency and power.

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Liberating Words with Jeanine Leane

When: Saturday 30 May 2026, 9:00am - 10:00am

Where: MAGNT Marquee, 19 Conacher St, The Gardens, NT 0820, Australia

First Peoples Australian literature demands its own direction. Sit down and listen as three eminent storytellers from different backgrounds talk about reclaiming history, disrupting english, inventing new forms, and using writing as a tool of resistance and truthtelling. With Ali Cobby Eckermann, Jeanine Leane, and Melanie Mununggurr in conversation.

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Ghosts Within with Natalia Figueroa Barroso

When: Saturday 30 May 2026, 10:15am - 11:15am

Location: MAGNT Marquee, 19 Conacher St, The Gardens, NT 0820, Australia

Samah Sabawi’s family memoir is a story of love, occupation and displacement from Palestinian homelands, Natalia Figueroa Barroso’s Hailstones Fell Without Rain covers three generations of Uruguyan women facing up to oppression, and Omar Musa’s Fierceland follows a young woman who must reckon with the sins of her forest-destroying father in Malaysian Borneo. These three books are haunted and compelled by family ghosts. Their authors sit down with Jess Ong to explore how to respond to inherited blessings and burdens.

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Writing When the World's On Fire with Natalia Figueroa Barroso

When: Sunday 31 May 2026, 10:15am - 11:15am

Location: MAGNT Marquee, 19 Conacher St, The Gardens, NT 0820, Australia

Ashley Kalagian Blunt's novel looks at the online radicalisation of young men, and Natalia Figueroa Barroso's punchy protagonists in Hailstones Fell Without Rain deal with generational echoes of a murder. How do these novelists bring humanity, warmth and humour into their stories? Get to know what these writers have to say about staying sane in the face of troubled times. This session is facilitated by Lisa Stefanoff.

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