Caro Llewellyn
Day 1: Keynote Address
Caro Llewellyn is CEO of the Wheeler Centre and the author of four works of non-fiction including the 2020 Stella Prize shortlisted memoir, Diving into Glass. She’s also the former director of several large scale literary festivals, including Sydney Writers’ Festival and the PEN World Voices Festival chaired by Salman Rushdie in New York.
Read more about Caro
hide
Caro began her life in literature as a publicist, before being appointed as the artistic director and CEO of Sydney Writers’ Festival (2002–2006). She was also responsible for the first-ever writer’s talk at the Sydney Opera House, later programming the series The Opera House Talks.
In 2006, Llewellyn was recruited by Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie to run the fledgling PEN World Voices Festival he’d established for the human rights organisation, PEN America, in New York City.
Llewellyn was also the artistic director of both the New Literature from Europe Festival in New York (2013–2015) and the Paris-based Festival des Écrivains du Monde for Columbia University (2012–2015).
In 2019, her memoir Diving into Glass was published by Hamish Hamilton and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize in 2020. Most recently, she has established Together-Remotely.com, a ticketed online programme of live curated events designed to support writers, readers, booksellers and publishers impacted by COVID-19 closures.
