‘People crave stories’: Why Adelaide Writers’ Week’s latest chapter is a Podfest
As more audiences turn to podcasts to get their storytelling fix, the newest addition to Adelaide Writers’ week celebrates the best of both worlds, on the page and in headphones.
How do podcasts fit into a literary festival? It’s a question that may be pondered by Adelaide Writers’ Week attendees who are accustomed to sitting under the blue shade sails in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden listening to writers talk about books, but the curator of the event’s new Podfest believes they’re a perfect match.
“I think at their core, both podcasts and books serve the same purpose,” Monique Bowley tells InReview.
“It’s about storytelling, sharing knowledge, creating meaningful experiences, but beyond that, the thing that they have in common is that they build worlds. They do it in different ways, but both books and podcasts create a very deep personal connection with their audiences.
“A great podcast is like a conversation with a trusted friend, it has that intimacy to it, while a great book is like stepping into someone else’s life for a bit… they are both forms of storytelling that stay with people long after the end.”
Like many festivals, Writers’ Week long maintained a podcast feed of panel recordings that allows listeners to catch up and revisit sessions after the festival. The inaugural Podfest, however, takes it further with live recordings of eight handpicked podcasts ranging from politics and true crime, to comedy, mental health and literature.
Bowley, who is manager of podcasts at the ABC and former architect of the Mamamia Podcast Network, believes the medium can “shape the cultural conversation”.
“Adelaide audiences are just so curious, we have this thriving arts and literature scene, and I wanted to have shows that spoke to those kinds of things – of curiosity and intelligence and fun. And I tried to go for a nice smorgasbord of genres.”
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Podfest curator Monique Bowley. Photo: Supplied
Among the line-up is the ABC’s Ladies, We Need to Talk, hosted by Yumi Stynes, which was named 2024 Podcast of the Year at the annual Australian Podcast Awards for its no-holds-barred exploration of topics including sex, fertility, menstruation, and mental health. Titled “How to live dangerously”, the Podfest episode will see guest authors Gina Chick, Jessie Tu and Anna Broinowski sharing stories about “what it means to defy expectations, take risks, and live life unapologetically”.
Another session taps into the public’s fascination with true crime, with Bowley saying moderator Dan Box and panellists Hedley Thomas, Rachael Brown and Meshel Laurie will delve into different aspects of the genre, including the ethical dilemmas raised by podcasts that reinvestigate cold cases.
A number of the Podfest panellists combine successful careers as writers and podcasters. Ladies, We Need to Talk spawned a book co-authored by Stynes and Claudine Ryan, and Thomas turned his hit true-crime podcast The Teacher’s Pet into a book. Chick, author of the memoir We Are The Stars, hosted season two of SBS’s Alone Australia podcast after winning the first series of the survivalist reality-TV show of the same name, and has shared her story as a guest on numerous other podcasts.
This crossover between books and podcasts may be on the rise, but Bowley says it isn’t new.
“The first time I heard it was Gretchen Rubin, who is an American author who has a show called Happier, and she made the podcast first and then turned it into a book… I thought it was such an interesting reversal of the model of publishing.
“I don’t know heaps about the publishing industry… but I think that there’s a sense of ‘let’s not give away all the information otherwise people won’t buy the books’, but what I’ve observed is that the opposite is true — people are so invested in content that they build the connection with a [podcast] host first and then they do buy the book.”
She has heard cases of publishers now actively scouting podcasts for book potential. At the same time, she says, podcasts have become an important promotional tool and creative extension of an author’s work.
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While many podcast fans will have cut their teeth on narrative-based shows like This American Life and Serial (whose 2017 series S-Town was downloaded 10 million times in four days), today there seems to be a preponderance of celebrity-hosted podcasts and smaller, chat-based shows. Bowley, who has developed and executive-produced award-winning shows such as The Pineapple Project, Fierce Girls and Mamamia Out Loud, says a key reason for this shift is that narrative podcasts are expensive and complex to create.
“I think the industry is starting to stabilise now and the focus is really sustainable business models… there are big-budget productions with really big celebrity names, and that’s fine, but what excites me as well is that these smaller, niche, deeply engaging podcasts with these very dedicated audiences are really thriving.
“And so, we’ve seen creators kind of change, and change the model of media, in that they rely on subscription models, crowdfunding, live events — it’s a really interesting time in podcasts.”
The one thing that stays the same, she says, is that “people crave stories and connection”.
“I think the future of podcasting is this interconnected sort of storytelling – this experience of content that deepens the engagement and builds communities.”
One Australian example cited by Bowley is Do Go On, which describes itself as a “fact-based comedy podcast” hosted by Melbourne comedians Matt Stewart, Jess Perkins and Dave Warneke. Do Go On’s sister podcast, Book Cheat, is the most overtly bookish inclusion in Podfest. Each week, host Warneke shares with his comedy guests the potted plot of a classic work of fiction — including the likes of James Joyce’s The Dead, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and George Orwell’s Animal Farm — so that listeners can pretend they have also read the novel.
Adelaide Writers’ Week. Photo: Andrew Beveridge / Supplied
“I thought it was such a beautiful book-adjacent show to bring to Adelaide,” Bowley says. “I suspect there are a lot of people in those [Writers’ Week] crowds who haven’t read the classics and I wanted this to say, ‘Hey, if you haven’t, that’s okay. We’ve got someone that’s done all the hard work for you. Just come and listen and have a laugh – everybody’s welcome here’.”
Other podcasts featured in Podfest include Not Stupid, co-hosted by author Julia Baird and journalist Jeremy Fernandez; Mundanara Bayles’ Black Magic Woman, which celebrates First Nations stories; All in the Mind, with presenter Sana Qadar; Double A Chattery, with Amanda Keller and Anita McGregor, and If You’re Listening, with Matt Bevan.
Despite the rapidly growing market for audiobooks and podcasts (the number of Australian podcast listeners is increasing by around 16 per cent each year), Bowley believes hard-copy books will always have their place.
“There’s something so beautiful about a book demanding your full attention; you can’t do anything else, you get completely immersed because you have to hold it and read it and be in it and visualise every scene.
“But, yeah, podcasts on the other hand just fit into everyday life and you can listen while you’re driving, while you’re cooking, exercising, walking the dog or whatever it is, so they are a more flexible form storytelling… same foundations, different formats — it’s not one or the other.”
Adelaide Writers’ Week 2025 runs from Saturday 1 March to Thursday 6 March. The full Adelaide Writers’ Week and Podfest schedule is available here.
Read more 2025 Adelaide Festival coverage here on InReview