The first day of this year's Byron Bay Writers' Festival, held over the weekend at the Byron Bay Beach Resort, was cancelled due to flooding and mud on the festival site.

However, all evening and indoor events still went ahead and truckloads of gravel were brought in for Saturday and Sunday, meaning all sessions went ahead on these sunny days.

 ‘I never want to see a truckload of gravel again in my life', festival director Jeni Caffin told WBN, adding that she was obviously disappointed for all the writers and guests who missed out on Friday's sessions.

Some small sessions were squeezed in on the other days, including an intimate session with Australia's top short story writers Cate Kennedy and Nam Le, which was sound-recorded on the day and should be soon available at the festival website.

The sessions focussing on humour with such diverse guests as Judith Lucy, Brian Dawe, Miriam Margoyles, The Chaser's Danny Katz, and Malaysian columnist Kam Raslan were packing out tents, as were the music-related sessions with Damien Leith and Hunters and Collectors singer and biographer Mark Seymour, who treated audiences to impromptu performances. Saturday's ‘Are they Laughing Yet' session was announced to be the biggest in the festival's history as the tent was opened up on all sides so guests could spill out and still view the proceedings.

The success of the musical guests could see next year's including more sessions on styles of writing other than books, with more songwriter, screenwriter, playwright, and poet panellists, according to Caffin. Diversity, not just in terms of form but in terms of author origin, is certainly an ongoing feature of the festival.

Besides the cancellations there was a definite laid-back and positive mood to the festival, with the help of an incredible amount of volunteers. The sign-language interpreters did an amazing job, especially when they had to bow to crowd requests to reinterpret certain words on stage during the comedy sessions.

Caffin reported that all the workshops, evening events and lunches were a success, and said some of the book launches were so ‘hot' (such as the four poets from Small Change Press--Pascalle Burton, Nathan Shepherdson, Sean M Whelan and David Stavanger) that they had to be moved to bigger venues on site.

Pam and Jon Welch were kept very busy in the Dymocks tent with big lines for author signings. This year's tent had the signings outside and therefore had much more room for stock inside, which was more successful than last year's indoor tables.

Pam Welch said the biggest seller was Sashi Tharoor's The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone (Arcade), and other big hits were Jackie French (numerous titles), David Stratton (I Peed on Fellini, Random House), and anything by Morris Gleitzman.

http://www.booksellerandpublisher.com.au/articles/2008/07/09028/

This article from Thorpe Bowker's Weekly Book Newsletter and Media Extra is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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