Tim Winton is a novelist based in Western Australia whom I have only sampled but 
who keeps having successes, with readers and with prizes.
Here is a friend's report of his reading at Geelong, one hour west of Melbourne:

Monday night we saw Tim Winton in Geelong reading to a packed house. 
He read from his new book and then answered questions, some of which were 
interesting, others were plain weird. 
One woman asked him to marry her, another woman was nursing a baby and asked a 
question about sexual asphyxiation, which apparently occurs in the book. 
Many people wanted to know how he wrote the book, it seems there is not a lot of 
room for people accepting books for what they are, or for the mystery of 
writing. Some people want everything explained. 
He seemed like a decent guy.

And here is a friend's report on Edward Albee's Sydney theatre 'conversation':

Last Sunday in Sydney Edward Albee was fairly negative about film as a visual 
medium.  It is their visual nature that makes film more commercially exploitable 
compared with plays which of course, center on words.  But one film he considers 
high art is the Russian film 'Burnt By the Sun' - just a name to me.  

Albee was irritable on Sunday, refusing to give anything to the slick, annoying 
Jonathan Biggins of the (?) STC.  
So it was sarcasm and enigmatic silences that prevailed, disappointingly, though 
one did get to feel Albee's famous anger rather powerfully.  
And his passion for Participation in Life was the one message he was prepared to 
spell out.  
That satisfied me anyway. 

(But Biggins kept pressing him: 'You say that writing plays should just feel 
natural if one is made a playwright, but what is it that makes a playwright, 
what is it do you think that made you a playwright, how does one know that one 
is made a playwright rather than a poet or a novelist, what do you think of when 
you're writing plays????' 
'I think about how glad I am that the lines don't need to rhyme', came Albee's 
quick response to this last question). 

At one point Biggins asked Albee why he has a tendency to walk out on plays.  
Because life's too short, came the obvious answer.  And because sometimes life 
is more interesting than plays.  
Once Albee went to a Samuel Beckett play in (some city in)  Ohio, deciding at 
interval to take a walk.  He didn't return to the theatre that night, because he 
found much more drama on the streets he walked than could be expected in any 
theatre, even if 'Sam' is the single most brilliant playwright of the 20th 
century....




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