Just two months into her tenure at Adelaide Writers’ Week, new Director Jo Dyer has utilised her connections to attract a global literary giant, the paradigm-shifting journalist and author Johann Hari, to SA for a one-night only event.
In June this year, Jo Dyer moved her career westward, opening the book on her reign in charge of our peak South Australian literary festival, Adelaide Writers' Week, which will host its 34th annual iteration next March.
For her first chapter, though, the former Sydney Writers’ Festival CEO will present an out-of-season evening this September with Johann Hari, who will speak about his most recent book ‘Lost Connections’, which has begun to transform public perceptions regarding the root causes of mental illness, as Jo explains.
“[In 'Lost Connections'] he’s looking at the phenomenon of depression and anxiety in our contemporary world and particularly the Western world from a whole range of different directions which I think is different from the more medical perspective and the treat-through-drugs prism, which has been the predominant one.”
While Johann doesn’t profess to have identified the entire truth, Jo does believe that he has revealed that the depression and anxiety isn’t necessarily always simply a result of malfunctioning signals in the brain.
“There are those people who really do have chemical imbalances in the brain, where having chemical treatments for them is important and necessary but it can’t be the case that suddenly 30 per cent of people in our time have chemical imbalances that weren’t experienced a few decades ago, so what has changed in the interim that could explain this huge upsurge in anxiety and depression?”
Jo says that writers across the globe, like Johann, Jean Twenge and Martin Graeber, are compiling a new thesis for one of our gravest social ills.
“They are leading to the same conclusion that the way that we are choosing to structure our societies and what we are choosing to give value to in our societies is leading to a psychological crisis and we need to quite dispassionately look at and acknowledge this phenomenon and then seek to address it.”
Johann will speak to Adelaide audiences on a spring evening, not in the scorching summer that normally accompanies Writers’ Week events. While running a session outside of festival season can sometimes be problematic, Jo witnessed up close the demand that exists for Johann’s message earlier in the year.
“Johann Hari was actually at Sydney Writers' Festival this year, my last festival and what he is talking about, I think it’s amazing how many people have responded to it.”
Johann’s popularity is due, in part, to the content of his message but also to his uncanny skill in conveying it, Jo says.
“He is a very charismatic speaker, so the event that we are doing in September is not an 'In Conversation' as often these events are, but him delivering a lecture and running his own Q&A with the audience.”
Events after 6PM, such as this one, could become a regular feature of Writers’ Week, as could an increase in content directed towards young readers and fans of spoken word and poetry. Jo, though, does not plan to shake up the status quo to the same extent as Johann Hari.
“There’s such a great legacy with SA Writers' Week from both Rose [Wight] and Laura [Kroetsch] that you don’t want to disrupt things that are working really brilliantly well and those six days down in the gardens are free for all, very accessible, where people can walk between the stages and delve into and discover authors that they may not know; all of that I don’t want to change.”
