Adelaide Writers' Week has always been the most literary of festivals, but it also loves a home-town author. And there's no doubt Julia Gillard was this year's star. In the appropriately named Pioneer Women's Memorial Garden, she drew 2400 listeners to her conversation with festival director Laura Kroetsch last Saturday. Although she has previously spoken in Adelaide about her memoir, My Story, this event was free, and she seems more relaxed as her political career recedes. However, when an audience member asked if she'd had a sense of deja vu recently (referring to government leadership speculation, if you're wondering), she said she had resolved not to comment on politics and, anyway, she was in Rwanda during "recent events". It's always hard being the speaker programmed against such a big attraction, and American musician-author of Wolf in White Van John Darnielle had a small but hard-core crowd for his conversation with James Bradley. Bradley, who grew up in Adelaide but lives in Sydney, also felt the home-town glow, noting he had never sold as many books at an event as the 100 copies of his new dystopian novel, Clade, that went after his talk on Sunday. Local poet and gardener Kate Llewellyn sold 280 copies of her memoir A Fig at the Gate.

NEW-LOOK FESTIVAL

This was my first time at Writers' Week since it went from biennial to annual in 2012 and Kroetsch took over from long-time director Rose Wight. Although traumatic for some loyalists, the transition seems smooth and successful, with the old tents replaced by blue sails that give shade, breezes and expandable spaces under the trees. (They'd be no good in rain but Kroetsch says the last wet festival was in 1996, and there are indoor alternatives for the top sessions.) There's still the laid-back atmosphere of being able to drift between free sessions on two stages surrounded by "living walls" of native plants, and the sound system is faultless. Kroetsch says numbers are rising each year and last year a pleasing 18 per cent were first-time visitors.

REMEMBERING THE PIONEERS

Author Peter Goldsworthy, chairman of the advisory committee, reminded us in his opening night speech of the first Writers' Week in 1960 – a small gathering in the YMCA Hall, but what an impressive all-Australian line-up: Clem Christesen, Stephen Murray Smith, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Morris West, Judah Waten, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Max Harris, Colin Thiele, Kenneth Slessor and more. In its 30th outing the program is far more diverse, with two days of children's events. It was a noisy week in Adelaide, with car racing, cricket and the arts festival meaning writers mingled in the hotel with Cold Chisel's Jimmy Barnes and former Wallabies captain George Gregan.

A KNOCKOUT PUNCH

Among the fine speakers I heard were English writers John Lanchester, Nicholas Shakespeare, Jenny Uglow and Tom Rob Smith; Americans Tom Rachman, Joanna Rakoff, Carl Hoffman, Porochista Khakpour, Jenny Offill and Roxane Gay; and Australians Robert Dessaix, Cate Kennedy, Ceridwen Dovey, Chris Flynn and  Ellen van Neerven. Best anecdote (to return to politics) was Lanchester's memory of the 1982 Oxford v Cambridge heavyweight boxing match in which "the Cambridge guy looked like an SS recruitment officer" and the Oxford fighter was "two feet shorter, hairy-backed" and doomed to lose. But on the bell Oxford's man threw a knockout punch. He was, of course, Tony Abbott. "As a prime minister he's an unqualified disaster, but I'm a huge fan of him as a boxer," Lanchester said.