As per usual for the Melbourne Writers Festival, fantasy is strictly for children.

The year that really made me rant and wave my hands was the year (I think last year, but don't quote me on that) they had Kate Forsyth, internationally published author of something like 8 huge-selling fantasy novels. And what did they have her talking about? Her new, first YA fantasy novel. (I'm sure it's a great little book. Just... for fuck's sake, people.)

This year, they have Margo Lanagan, who is - fair enough - a YA author (though the borders are blurring more than ever between "adult" and "YA"... for everyone but the organisers of the MWF). She's involved in the first panel at the MWF that I've actually wanted to attend in all the years I've been perusing and bitterly spitting upon the program - Myths with a Twist, possessing the bold appellation: "Do fantasy writers avoid reality, or confront it more directly?" Oh glory! Oh frabjous day! Oh bollocks, it is - of course - on the Schools Program.

Because fantasy is for kids.

(To back this up, another panel Ms Lanagan is on is actually for growed-ups, but is charmingly entitled: "Other worlds: Worlds in which young readers can lose themselves." Gee, thanks.)

When I first came down to Melbourne, it was to attend the RMIT's celebrated Professional Writing and Editing program. I was a little bit nervous, because I am (just in case anyone didn't know) a genre writer. I read and write (and breathe and dream) fantasy. And I was worried that a snooty Melbourne writing course would turn up its literary nose at what I had to bring to the table. But it wasn't so. Everyone in the course - teachers and fellow students - was really interested in engaging with my work, and learning what my point of view could show in their own work. There was a hefty handful of other genre/speculative authors as well, to the point there my dozen-strong advanced novel course had another fantasy author in it as well.

If I was in any danger of considering that perhaps I'd been wrong about Melbourne, however, the Writers Festival reassures me every year that Melbourne is, actually, still completely snobbish about "literature". (To a certain extent, the same bias can be witnessed in The Age's coverage of books every weekend, though they are considerably more enlightened on the topic.)

It's not just fantasy (and sci-fi and horror) that get the shaft. Romance is another bastard cousin best not talked about. Which also makes me flail, because there's an incredible depth of talent (not to mention experience and publishing dollars) in Melbourne in speculative and romantic fiction. Crime gets a look-in - apparently it's acceptable, and we can possibly thank Text Publishing for that. And historical fiction has always been happy to tag along as literary fiction's more scholarly sibling.

Now, I freely, fully and brazenly admit that a lot of the stuff being merrily churned out upon the hamster wheel of Australia's lone spec-fic imprint - Harper Collins' Voyager - is mediocre and simplistic realist-storytelling pap (for which I'm absolutely certain we can all blame Sara Douglass). But there are Australian authors doing inventive, innovative, decidedly literary things with the fantasy genre (the mind springs immediately to KJ Bishop here - someone told me once she was a Melbourne girl, but I don't know whether that's true).

Despite that, at least as far as the Melbourne Writers Festival is concerned, fantasy remains just for kids. (It's enough to make me want to send them all a copy of KJ Parker's Shadow, because if that doesn't blow their minds out their ears, they're possibly too stuffy to live.)