Today was to be Kerrie and Bob's last day at the festival - they were returning to Adelaide in the morning, so combine that with the very late night before after the Ned Kelly awards and it was a slightly bedraggled group that staggered in for the 10.30am Panel - Unconditional Love.
This was a panel about 4 books - LET THE RIGHT ONE IN - the story of a chaste vampire love story; COURTESANS - the true story of 4 women in the 17th and 18th Century - living in the "half world", and LOVE LIKE WATER by Meme McDonald. I have to confess that the last book mentioned doesn't interest me in anyway, but I left this panel with a desperate urge to get hold of COURTESANS - the author of that book was really interesting and the idea behind the book - the true story of 4 Courtesans and how their lives "worked" in the time periods in which they lived was fascinating. Basically the panel discussed how an unlikely / unexpected love can work.
Next up that day was PROFILER - with Leah Giarratano, Quintin Jardine and Gabrielle Lord - this panel is one I alluded to earlier in my general post about new authors - it ranged around how various types of investigators work in fact and fiction. A fascinating panel - in no small way due to the input from Leah Giarratano who was just fascinating. Having said that Quintin Jardine and Gabrielle Lord held up their sides of the panel well - discussing how the investigative techniques work in their books - how they develop their characters and the amount of research done in setting up the premises for their books (Lord does an enormous amount of research).
The last panel of this day we divided up - Kerrie and Bob went to THE NEVER SAW IT COMING with Michael Robotham, Normal Lebrecht, Sarah Hopkins and James Phelan. We went to BREAKING OUT with John Ajvide Lindquist and Ewan Morrison - which was about the trials and tribulations and affect on the author that having your books translated into other languages has. This was a fascinating discussion as the 2 authors chatted with a more than excellent moderator - whose name I missed and I was sorry about that. The moderator knew his stuff, asked pertinent questions, guided the discussion but mostly sat back and let two very articulate and amusing authors chat. Again I alluded to some of the content of this panel in my new author post recently. The idea of having your work translated - basically - seems to offer the ultimate in exciting - a new audience. At the same time - you hand control of your baby over and have to hope for the best. There's also the problem of losing the flow or cadence of the original language. John mentioned that he felt the English translation of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN loses some of the cadence of the original language - luckily I think it must be pretty stunning in the original as it flowed beautifully as far as I was concerned (his translator is the same person that translates Henning Mankell - I think that he's possibly been very lucky in the publishers choice of translator).
Home to get some sleep as we had a big day on Friday.