A look at what's on in Canberra's literary scene over the coming weeks.

Power structures are trembling under the weight of ''bullshit'' and the power of words, says the Sydney Writers' Festival artistic director.

One of the year's most anticipated Broadway plays - the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird - faces a legal challenge from Lee's estate, which is suing over Sorkin's version of the story.

Cleo Wade is a political campaigner and Instagram poet whose words have adorned mugs and billboards. Dubbed the Millennial Oprah – a tag she hates – Wade is pushing a new approach to change.

Talking is an impromptu dance of tempo and pitch and split-second timing.

Peter Temple, the first crime writer to win Australia’s most significant literary award, the Miles Franklin, has died. He was 71.

Reading Alice Hoffman's At Risk taught Holly Ringland how to be brave and truthful in her writing.

Jaxie Clarkson is on the run after the abrupt end to his violent family life. Until, that is, he meets Fintan MacGillis, a man marooned in the outback who will change Jaxie for ever.

Zadie Smith's essays often use playful pop-culture references and self-deprecating humour to smooth the path for their serious concerns.

martin Flanagan begins his book about the 2016 premiership with a lengthy dissection of the character and history of the western suburbs and the Dogs, and this feels right.

Underwater photographer and shark expert Valerie Taylor says she has had the best life of anyone she knows.

Literary news and events in Canberra.

When Tomi Adeyemi wrote stories as a child she never created black characters and the books she read never had black characters. Partly inspired by the Black Lives Matter campaign, all that has changed.

Shokoofeh Azar escaped from Iran after being arrested three times and three months' spell in isolation in jail. Now her writing is being recognised in her new home.

Part comedy, part road trip, part tragedy, Restless Souls is an insightful exploration of many issues

Heidi Sopinka has taken the adventurous life of an artist of uncompromising vision and written about it in a way that feels decorative and compromised.

Glenda Guest takes a plot worthy of Shakespearean romance and infuses it with vividness.

Sign is a claustrophobic road-trip thriller with tension and real menace.

Rhiannon Navin's Only Child is told by Zachary, just six when a gunman rampages through his school, changing his family forever.

He was called Caesar, a codename to protect him after he smuggled thousands of pictures of the victims of the Assad regime out of Syria.

In December 2014 Peter Hammarstedt set out to catch the Thunder, which was also wanted by Interpol, for the illegal trawling of endangered species.

Taking the metaphor of the river as a life's journey, Ian Tyrrell tells the story of Cooks River, emphasising the way European Australians have used.

Mary Shelley was only 18 when she wrote Frankenstein. It went on to become an English classic.

A secret language of Australian wildflowers forms the heart of Holly Ringland's debut novel, which has been snapped up for publication around the word.