Germaine Greer and Augusten Burroughs will open this year's Melbourne Writers' Festival.

Greer, whose essay On Rage is due to be published by MUP in August, will deliver a keynote address on the topic at the Melbourne Town Hall on 22 August, to be followed by a late night session with August Burroughs--‘a late night event for a very different audience', according to festival director Rosemary Cameron.

While the town hall has played host to the opening night addresses many times, the 2008 festival--the biggest Melbourne Writers' Festival in history with well over 300 events and 300 participants--will be mostly located in and around Federation Square, with daytime events within walking distance of one another.

'We have our largest and most comprehensive professional development program with masterclasses being offered by Lloyd Jones, Andrew Davies (UK scriptwriter--Pride & Prejudice, Bridget Jones Diary etc), David Leser, and Kate Mosse, among others, and a series of shorter workshops based on the idea of writing life stories to celebrate the Immigration Museum's tenth anniversary,' Cameron told WBN.

Lectures and monologues will be presented by Paul Keating, David Sedaris, Orlando Figes, John Pilger, Susan Maushart, Michael Burleigh, Philip Gourevitch and others for The Big Ideas series.

This year's schools program will feature 44 events across three days from 25 to 27 August. Also for children is the WordPlay at ArtPlay program, which will run on the festival's two weekends and feature favourite authors such as Andy Griffiths, Terry Denton, Dawn French, Leigh Hobbs and Danny Katz, among others. There will also be a range of book launches at the festival including Melbourne-focussed books by Graeme Blundell and Anita Heiss.

Cameron also celebrates another festival first with Melbourne's new City of Literature status, which she hopes will be announced prior to the festival. As part of this, MWF will hook up via satellite with the Edinburgh International Book Festival, sending them Nam Le. In return, MWF audiences will be treated to Salman Rushdie via satellite. Cameron hopes this will be the first of many co-productions between the two festivals.

Behind the scenes, Cameron says ‘we are setting up industry meetings for some of our international guests who will connect with very specific groups'. Also, ‘authors will be spoilt for choice with three festival events--a welcome at Government House on Thursday, August 21, our opening night party on Saturday, August 23 and the author-only dinner at North Fitzroy Star on Thursday, August 28'.

Festival bookings open on July 18. Visit http://www.mwf.com.au/ for more information.

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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