Addi Road Writers’ Festival To Bring Writers, Music & Art to Marrickville This May
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The Addi Road Writers’ Festival is returning to Marrickville this May, bringing a full day of talks, performances and offbeat creative work to Sydney’s inner west.
Set to take over the Addi Road Community Centre in Marrickville on Saturday 16 May from 11am to 6pm, the 2026 festival promises a full day of talks, performances and creative crossovers – the kind that feel more like a “literary warehouse party” than a traditional writers’ event.
A festival built on ‘Truth Beauty | Beauty Truth’
This year’s theme – Truth Beauty | Beauty Truth – leans into big questions without pretending to have neat answers. As organisers put it, the festival asks how we “connect to a meaningful and healing sensibility in life and art while also facing up to the world as it is today”.
The festival positions creative expression as a kind of antidote – something that can “inspire as well as stimulate” and offer “moments of music and poetry and thought that reach towards the highest and best in us”.
Across the day, that idea takes shape through a mix of panels, performances and experimental works spanning the political, the spiritual and the deeply personal.
Addi Road Writers’ Fest: panels, poetry, live music & more
The 2026 program includes ten panels and talks spread across three on-site venues – Gumbramorra Hall, the StirrUp Gallery and the Greek Theatre – alongside an art exhibition, theatre, and a series of live music and spoken word “hotspots”.
There’s also a live storytelling event presented in comic-book form with screen projections, plus, in the festival’s own words, “a really noisy duo making a hell of a racket”.
Panel topics range widely, from crime writing and Latin American short stories, to reflections on illness and anxiety, conversations about communicating with the dead through art, and even “an instruction kit on how to not freak out about the future”.
This year’s featured guests bring together established voices and boundary-pushing creatives. Among them is acclaimed poet and visual artist Judith Nangala Crispin, award-winning novelist Luke Carman, and Dr Sonya Voumard, whose book Tremor explores life with a rare movement disorder.
They’re joined by novelist Yumna Kassab, ANU literature professor Chris Danta, Kamilaroi crime writer Philip McLaren, and cartoonist Fionn McCabe, alongside poet Vaughn Upward Garcia and the Dorr-e Dari Artistic Group – a collective of young Afghan creators working across theatre, poetry and music.
It’s a deliberately mixed bill, reflecting the festival’s ethos of blending disciplines and perspectives rather than siloing them.
Tickets are priced with accessibility front of mind: $50 full price, $40 early bird, and $20 ‘affordable tickets’ for students, unemployed attendees and others who need it.
Organisers emphasise a trust-based approach, encouraging people to pay what they can so cost isn’t a barrier. One ticket grants access to all events across the day, subject to venue capacity.
Most importantly, all profits from the festival go directly into Addi Road’s food relief programs and broader community work – meaning a day spent listening, watching and thinking also feeds back into the local area in a very real way.
Addi Road isn’t just a venue to host a festival, it’s a long-running community organisation marking its 50th year in 2026. Based at 142 Addison Road in Marrickville, the centre works across a wide range of humanitarian initiatives, from food relief to arts and cultural programming.
You can find out more about Addi Road Writers’ Festival here.
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