Writers air their anxieties at community centre’s literary festival

Like many writers, Sonya Voumard knows the crippling feeling of paralysis known as writer’s block.

As she outlined in her memoir Tremor, A Movement Disorder in a Disordered World, which won the 2024 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize for non-fiction, her anxiety ran deeper than most.

From her early teens, she experienced an unexplained hand tremor, which worsened with age and was compounded by neck spasms and mental health challenges, including anxiety.

As a political correspondent for The Age in the rough-and-tumble world of the Canberra press gallery of the early 1990s, she masked her mysterious symptoms and angst by drinking alcohol and taking painkillers.

“Anxiety has many manifestations. In my case, it is related to dystonia, which is a neurological disorder I have that was only diagnosed late in life and affects my brain circuitry. It also causes my head and hands to shake which can make me look anxious – which in turn can feed my anxiety. If people know I have dystonia, it helps to dissipate the symptoms of my anxiety because I am not constantly worrying about being judged,” she says.

Along with novelist Kim Kelly – whose first book of creative non-fiction, Touched, also about anxiety won the 2025 Finlay Lloyd 20/40 non-fiction prize – and moderator Dr Michelle Hamadache, a creative writing teacher at Macquarie University, Voumard will be part of a panel on Saturday, May 16, in Marrickville on attacking anxiety.

It’s part of the 2026 Addi Road Writers’ Festival, at the inner west community organisation engaged in humanitarian and human rights work across a spectrum of activities from food relief to arts and culture events.

“As people and authors who have lived experience of anxiety and who have written about it in recent books, we wanted to reframe it. The idea is to take back control of the forceful nature of anxiety given that so much of this very prevalent condition is about people not feeling in control. We also thought it was important to name anxiety and be upfront about it in our writing,” Voumard says.

Now in its sixth year, the festival is the brainchild of award-winning writer Mark Mordue.

“As we all know, there is plenty to be anxious about. Many of us worry about the state of the world and the future – for ourselves and those we love, for everyone really,” Mordue says.

According to Beyond Blue, one in four Australians (3.4 million) live with anxiety and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare says 17 per cent of Australians have experienced an anxiety disorder at some point.

Mordue points to the controversies surrounding various Australian literary festivals – which have faced high-profile resignations, open letters, petitions and cancellations amid conflict in the Middle East – as a source of anxiety for those running them. The 2026 Adelaide Writers’ Week was cancelled after the board withdrew its invitation to Randa Abdel-Fattah, sparking a boycott by authors, and controversy surrounded the Newcastle and Sydney Writers’ festivals after their respective directors included the Palestinian-Australian author in their program.

“Entire festivals are silenced,” Mordue says.

“Artistic directors need to check for a target on their backs or a stamp of approval on their foreheads. So yes, running a festival is polluted by anxiety that has nothing to do with art or ability or quality or writing or even ideas.”

But he says that’s nothing compared to the anxiety of the people who rely on Addi Road’s free food pantry and other services. Festival profits from the $50 entry fee ($40 early bird and $20 affordable tickets for students and unemployed) are funnelled right back to those programs.

As well as the panel on anxiety, there will be sessions on crime writing, Latin American short stories, Afghani poetry, rock ‘n’ roll, reflections on illness and an instruction kit on how to not freak out about the future.

With its theme, “Beauty, Truth” the festival will feature writers, as well as those anxious about how they afford to stay living in Sydney like young musicians, philosophers, painters, cartoonists, spoken word performers and translators. “It’s about storytelling in many forms and entertainment too,” says Mordue.

The Addi Road Writers’ Festival is on Saturday, May 16 from 11am-6pm. Details: addiroad.org.au/writers-festival/

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