A Bigger Brighter World has been pushing through crowds and shuffling along queues with sticky-noted books at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this week.

Pictured here are the stars of the second day at the Carrington Hotel stage of the Varuna and Sydney Writers’ Festival.

For more photos of the authors, pop over to our Facebook page.

While in Katoomba we had the enormous pleasure of sitting in on five literary discussions and hearing:

• John Connell, author of The Ghost Estate, talk with Ellen van Neerven, author of Heat and Light (winner of the David Unaipon Award and shortlisted for the Stella Prize), about the role of place and the resonance of the past in their work.
• Geordie Williamson interrogate British author Helen Macdonald, whose H is for Hawk (already acclaimed as a modern classic and receiving a big tick from this reviewer) has won both the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction and the 2014 Costa Book of the Year Award.
• Joan London, whose The Golden Age has been shortlisted for almost every prize going.
• Helen Razer and Bernard Keane, whose A Short History of Stupid explains how, in an age of instant knowledge, public debate has become so stupid. (“It will spark debate, soothe the terminally frustrated and outrage the righteously Stupid.”)
• Debra Adelaide, who edited The Simple Act of Reading (a collection of essays and memoir pieces on the topic of reading, in particular what it means for writers to be readers and how that has shaped their life) chatting with Tegan Bennett Daylight and Geordie Williamson.

Williamson has been chief literary critic at The Australian since 2008. In 2011, he won the Pascall Prize for criticism and his first book, The Burning Library, reintroduces us to key writers whose works we may have forgotten or missed altogether. He is currently at work on a second non-fiction title, based on his Scottish forbear’s half-century ownership of Easter Island.

After you’ve checked the photos and grabs from these writers on A Bigger Brighter World’s Facebook page, linger a while for more news from the Sydney Writers’ Festival and other festivals, the latest shortlists, longlists and prize winners, paeans to libraries and bookstores, recommendations and reviews.