Story Week is returning to Sydney and the Blue Mountains from 16 to 26 October, promising ten days of poetry, slams, dinners and conversations that put people at the heart of storytelling. The program insists on slowing down, creating space for tales to be told, and encouraging audiences to engage in ways that go beyond the usual festival format.
Among the highlights will be the National Australian Poetry Slam Finals at the Sydney Opera House on 26 October, where the top 16 poets from across the country will compete for the chance to be named the 2025 Slam-bassador. That role carries opportunities to tour internationally, with gigs, publications and mentoring worth about $20,000. It follows heats and finals held in 50 towns and cities around Australia.
This year’s Story Week is also set to bring voices from Mumbai into Sydney’s orbit. A group of poets and writers will present their work in the multi-lingual stories series and perform on the slam stage, joining a festival that is as much about conversation as it is about performance.
The theme for 2025, “Grow Deeper,” is a deliberate push against the idea of bigger being better. “With the Story Week theme Grow Deeper, we ask everyone to slow down, to carve out time and space for storytelling,” said Creative Director Miles Merrill. “Whether it’s at a dinner table, in the spotlight on a slam stage, or over a cuppa at lunch. We’re bringing stories back to the centre of community life, where they can feed, challenge and nurture us. We can’t have fire circles kindling in our everyday urban lives but we can still share tales around a glowing light or a hot meal.”
Events will take place in venues across Sydney, including a new partnership with Caption by Hyatt Central Sydney, where the hotel’s Talk Shop café-bar-lounge will become a hub. “We are proud to partner with Word Travels to host this year’s Story Week events,” said Peter Roach, Director of Sales & Marketing at Caption by Hyatt Central Sydney. “Caption by Hyatt Central Sydney invites guests to ‘Be Part of It’—part of stories unfolding, part of artistic expression, and part of community. Talk Shop is the perfect platform to showcase the diversity, creativity and voices that define Story Week 2025.”
From poet-taster sessions where diners are served poems with their meals, to story dinners at Kyiv Social and Word Travels’ Blackheath space, and Con-Verse gatherings that blur the line between performance and discussion, the festival is designed to put artists and audiences face to face. Other major events include Speaking Fire at Redfern Community Centre, curated by Gomeroi writer Rob Waters, and Chasing Change, a program exploring migrant resilience curated by Somali poet Hani Abdile.
Antoine Lewis
Antoine Lewis comes to Story Week from Mumbai wearing many hats. Known as a food and drink writer for local and national newspapers and magazines, his work has ranged from neighbourhood food stories and restaurant reviews to comment pieces and explorations of regional Indian cuisines. His weekly Food & Book show on 94.3 Radio One’s Good Morning Mumbai recently celebrated its tenth anniversary and has expanded to a national audience.
Beyond journalism, he is the Programming Director of Literature Live!, the Mumbai International Litfest, where he oversees programming and has helped grow the event into a regular fixture on India’s literary calendar. His presence in Sydney signals an interest in cross-cultural dialogue that extends beyond food or literature into the ways stories travel between communities. When he is not writing or programming festivals, he notes with humour that he is “at the beck and call to his two cats and dog.”
Priya Srinivasan
For Priya Srinivasan, the path from journalism to education and arts programming was shaped by personal experience. As she recalls, she was “a young mother looking for play based arts education for her 6 year old” when she realised she wanted to move away from reporting and into building something of her own. In 2006 she founded The Pomegranate Workshop in Mumbai, which set out to embed arts into education at schools.
Over nearly two decades, Pomegranate has become a partner for Mumbai schools wanting to integrate theatre and film into their curriculum. The workshop’s productions have gone on to win international recognition and its projects have connected students and teachers in India with counterparts in the UK, US and Australia. The work has been particularly powerful in low income schools and among marginalised groups, including Mumbai’s transgender community. “Leveraging the arts as the most powerful agent of change,” Pomegranate has become, in her words, “a springboard for many artists to find their voice through theatre, film and visual art.”
Her presence at Story Week fits neatly into the festival’s ethos of making art accessible, building dialogue, and breaking down traditional divisions between artist and audience.
Ashu Bhoir
Among the most powerful voices to appear will be that of Ashu Bhoir, a transwoman who has worked for 12 years with Humsafar Trust in Mumbai. Ashu’s story is deeply personal, shaped by her transition and the social barriers she has faced. She recalls growing up feeling “something was ‘not right’,” as people told her she was a boy when she never felt that way inside. “I felt broken often and my faith in myself was often broken by people,” she says.
The turning point came when the very accusations and shaming she experienced gave her “a blaze of resolve that took me into my transition journey.” Now, she says, “when I face the mirror, I know this is the real me, yes this is.”
Her experiences post-transition have been marked by revelations about what it means to live as a woman in society. “While I may not experience menstruation, I can certainly experience the societal prejudices on it,” she explains. The dangers of travelling alone at night, the taboos, and the restrictions imposed on women have been first-hand lessons. Her poem Bal Vivaah (child marriage) reflects on these insights and the realities she has faced.
Ashu’s voice in Sydney will bring lived experience into the poetry of resistance and self-discovery, resonating with Story Week’s broader themes of survival, resilience and expression.
Beni Yanthan (Yanbeni)
The final Mumbai voice joining Story Week is Beni Yanthan, also known as Yanbeni, a writer from the indigenous Lotha-Naga tribe of Nagaland. Her work spans poetry, essays, reviews and short stories, with publications in journals and platforms including Raiot, Sapiens, The Bangalore Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Hindu, Outlook India and Muse India.
As an academic, she focuses on folk culture, vernacular literature, oral traditions and literary theory, and she currently works as Assistant Professor of English at Nagaland University. Her voice at Story Week adds depth to the festival’s multi-lingual series, with its focus on celebrating languages and identities outside of English. Her writing speaks to traditions often marginalised in mainstream literature, offering both academic and creative insights into how stories shape and reflect community life.
Story Week 2025 opens on 16 October and will run across ten days, with events in Sydney, Chippendale, Redfern and the Blue Mountains. With the addition of international poets like Antoine Lewis, Priya Srinivasan, Ashu Bhoir and Beni Yanthan, the program builds links between Australia and India’s creative scenes while offering audiences the chance to hear voices that challenge, inspire and move in equal measure.
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