Exhibition Dates: 9 – 12 October 2025
Opening Hours: 8am – Late
Venue: Underground Theatre Foyer, Brisbane Powerhouse
As you enter the industrial chic of Brisbane Powerhouse for this year’s Brisbane Writers Festival, your eye is drawn to a series of images that adorn the walls. The scenes are uncanny, fantastical, arresting. You experience a rush of feelings: confusion, elation, curiosity. But there’s something else, something you can’t quite put your finger–
Wait. Is that Richard Glover?!
You realise that other figures in these surreal tableaux look suspiciously like beloved Australian writers, many of whom feature in this year’s festival program and all of whom are alumni of festivals past. Anita Heiss! Debra Oswald! Kris Kneen! Susan Johnson! Ceridwen Dovey! Winnie Dunn! Kristina Olsson! Pascalle Burton! Carody Culver! Michelle Law! Myles McGuire! And now you understand who must be behind this.
Who else but Jackie Ryan – award-winning writer and visual artist, Brisbane Writers Festival artistic director, long-term collector of strange wigs – could coax such esteemed wordsmiths into sharp bobs, fake wounds and safari suits? Who else could transpose them into a visual landscape that blends a pop aesthetic with top notes of Armageddon?
The Writers on the Wall doesn’t just demonstrate what exceptional posers these authors are. It celebrates its subjects’ magnificence through a new lens, playfully embodying BWF’s mandate to put the festive in festival and reminding you of art’s boundless capacity to entertain and enchant.
Your satisfaction is twofold. First, you can congratulate yourself on having solved this literary version of Where’s Wally. Second, you can revel in its unapologetic display of authorial star power, its dauntless imperative to put writers where they should perhaps be asked to spend more time: in the spotlight.
