After several weeks of mild weather, Adelaide has poured on the heat for this week's Adelaide Writer's Week, part of the wider Adelaide Festival of Arts. 

As temperatures hovered around 35 degrees, even shirt-and-tie-clad Premier Mike Rann welcomed a shot of cold water from the roving 'sprayers' employed to keep the crowd cool.  

Mike Rann 'cops a spray'

In spite of the heat, today's author events attracted good crowds late into the day, particularly David Malouf who filled the western tent and the shaded overflow areas.  Malouf spoke about his new book, The Complete Stories, joking with the crowd that these types of collections are normally released posthumously.

In the eastern tent, Deborah Robertson spoke about her most recent book, Careless, which won the 2007 Nita B. Kibble Awards and the 2006 Colin Roderick Award, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and The Age Book of the Year.

Deborah Robertson speaks about her book Careless

Tomorrow's schedule promises to provide the highlight of the week, with the much-awaited launch of both Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book and Peter Carey's His Illegal Self.  The only problem will be choosing which event to attend, as curiously both are scheduled at the same time.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like we will get any respite from the weather - the forecast is for 34, 37, 37, 35 degrees over the final four days of the event...

FROM THE ADELAIDE WRITERS' WEEK WEBSITE - http://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/Show/Detail.aspx?p=5&c=9&id=8

Writers’ Week – Australia’s most anticipated literary festival. It is now nearly half a century since Writers’ Week first emerged as one of the highlights of the Adelaide Festival.

David Malouf signs books

Since its beginnings in the 1960s, Adelaide Writers’ Week has come to be recognised and acclaimed, not only at home but around the world, for the distinction and diversity of its contributors.

Writers’ Week is also celebrated for creative encounters with splendid writing and eminent writers in the shade of tents and plane trees, in a park setting where an amiable late-summer mood prevails. Here readers mingle with some of the world’s most exciting literary figures, in a meeting place between a memorial garden for women and a colonial parade ground, on Kaurna country.

While 2008 Writers’ Week will feature writers from a number of nations around the world, this year we will hear rather more voices from the United States of America and from Scotland. Poets and novelists, historians and biographers, journalists, editors, writers of literary fiction and publishers will engage, as we have come to expect, in a free and easy exchange.

We look forward to catching up with you at one of the world’s most stimulating literary events.

Tags: adelaide writers week, david malouf, deborah robertson, geraldine brooks, peter carey