The International Literary Festival

Canada's and Australia's constantly evolving identities allow us to re-imagine our literature, and therefore ourselves.

It was at the 1994 International Festival of Authors that the Empty Chair was introduced, that sad, lonely symbol that speaks so powerfully for the writer silenced by censorship. PEN Canada devised this technique – elegant in its real-world simplicity – to draw our attention to the writer(s) who would have no hope of attending the festival. Writers restricted not by a crowded schedule or an aversion to travel, but by a visa denial, a prison sentence, a death threat, or even death itself.

It was an idea soon taken up by PEN centres in Australia and the many writers festivals that flourish here, including the one I have the privilege to direct in 2010, the Sydney Writers' Festival.

Like PEN itself, the Empty Chair sets our focus on the international – on the discourse among writers from different countries, on literature not bound by the borders of nationalism, but free to roam. It is a mode perfectly suited to Canada and Australia, linked by our strong Indigenous cultures and our new world, immigrant composition.

Australians seem to be forever re-discovering Canada. Not that what is great about Canada is so easily forgotten. Sure, both countries have had the privilege (and the burden) to be linked linguistically to not one but two consecutive world powers. And it seems we will always vie for the other's attention, mediated through and dominated by the great literary and cultural production of the U.S.

It's more that Canada and particularly its writers seem to always have something fresh to say. A new idea that will send Australia re-inventing itself and looking to the far north with renewed, often quiet, appreciation.

This happened perhaps most profoundly in the '60s and '70s, when Canada gave us and the world the framing of multiculturalism through which to view our national identity. Australia imported the term, first (it is often forgotten) by a centre-right government in the '70s, and then more fully implemented on a policy level by a centre-left government in the '80s.

Although not without its critics and contention, multiculturalism has flourished. For Canada it was a powerful riposte to biculturalism, and for Australia, a challenge to the white picket fence of monoculture. Our countries have a history, if not shared, then at least running on parallel tracks. Both have strong Indigenous/First Nation voices in literature, and there has been an embrace of internationalism and multiculturalism as defining features of our national identities.

Indeed, we have un-settled the territory of national identity and have resolved to leave it unresolved, to be forever in play, evolving, open to influence. Forever poised to discover the new. This has bequeathed us a literature that is similarly unsettled, in discourse with the international, and representative of our evolving identity.

Can we imagine or fully understand an Anne Michaels without this transnational discourse, this evolving play with identity? A Michael Ondaatje? In the Australian context, a Christos Tsiolkas? Winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize (and the top-selling novel in Australia this past year), Tsiolkas's The Slap explores the often brutal reality of life among the upwardly mobile and status-conscious denizens of inner-city Melbourne. An Australian of Greek parentage, several of Tsiolkas’s characters are Greek, another is Indian, and others are Australians of various origins, Indigenous among them. Their lives are messy, unresolved, unsettled.

One of the most astonishing debuts this past year was The Boat. The author, Nam Le, was born in Vietnam, raised and educated in Australia, the Iowa Writers Workshop in the U.S., and the University of East Anglia in the UK. Now he seems to wander the globe, transplanted to different locations like the stories in his collection. Le is like the vessel in his title, untethered, at sea, although there is no question in anyone's mind that he and what he has produced are Australian.

Our literature feels alive to invention and free to roam, and the 30th anniversary of the International Festival of Authors, itself in dialogue with the world, is a perfect time to acknowledge the debt for the re-imagining and re-understanding of our literature, and therefore ourselves.