The (admittedly pretty pleasant) dilemma faced every year by Katherine Dorrington, program manager of the Perth Writers Festival, is how to distil 12 months' worth of fantastic literary output from around WA, the rest of Australia and the rest of the world into a weekend-long event.

“I’m obviously a voracious reader and I get sent a lot of books and buy a lot of books. There are also a number of blogs that I look at and a lot of time in spent looking at who to invite to the festival,” she explains, adding that attending other literary festivals and events is also a source of inspiration.

Dorrington says she’s thrilled that this year’s festival – which runs from Friday, February 26, ’til Monday, March 1, at UWA – will be hosting a number of writers who have been on her wish-list for a while, including Trainspotting author, Irvine Welsh, and writer/psychologist, Sally Vickers.

“I’m also really excited about David Finkel, who has written an outstanding book, The Good Soldiers, about Iraq, about being an embedded reporter with soldiers for eight months in a particularly nasty part of Baghdad in 2007. He is going to be a real hit of the festival and is someone I’m really looking forward to meeting.

“Another writer I’m fascinated to meet is Eleanor Catton. Her book, The Rehearsal, was released last year and was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and is really, really interesting.

“It’s quite hard to explain, but it plays around with performance and looks at a high-school scandal between a student and teacher which the high-school drama society then takes and dramatises.”

While Dorrington is obviously enthusiastic about big-name international guests such as these and fellow high-profile festival guests such as Scottish historian and travel writer William Dalrymple, American naturalist Barry Lopez, British horticulturalist Monty Don and British philosopher AC Grayling, who is giving the festival’s opening address, she’s equally excited about showcasing WA writers.

Local talent including Liz Byrski, Julia Lawinson, Niall Lucy, Tom Baddeley and Tracey Gibbs will be appearing during the festival, alongside many other WA and Australian writers. Directors of writers’ festivals from around the world will also be attending as part of the Visiting Directors Program, providing extra-special networking opportunities.

“For me, it’s really exciting to put local and international authors on the same panel,” Dorrington explains. “It’s a great chance for local writers to expose their work to a larger group of people as it brings so many people into one spot at one time.”

So with writers’ festivals flourishing both locally and around the world from, Ubud to Antigua and seemingly everywhere in between, does Dorrington find it difficult to differentiate the Perth Writers Festival from the competition?

“We’re the biggest writers’ festival in the state with over 100 participants in over 150 events and we really have an international, national and local focus and I think that’s a big point of difference from the other ones in WA,” she says. “The diversity of our program is a big point of difference, as is our focus on families and young people, which is quite unique in the writers’ festival world.”

Indeed, this year’s Family Day looks to be the biggest yet and includes a number of events that should hold plenty of appeal to big kids and the young-at-heart, including an appearance by Gen Y childhood hero, Morris Gleitzman, and the fun and fairly self-Explanatory Haircuts By Children event.

As usual, the festival includes a high proportion of free events, including panel talks and interviews. Other free – and interactive – events taking place at the festival include StoryCatcher, an ABC Radio project that will see a converted former broadcast caravan parked on the festival precinct at UWA to record people’s personal stories.

“We’re asking people to come in in pairs – you don’t have to, but it’s a nice way to do it – and sit down and record a story they want to tell,” Dorrington explains. “Then the ABC will give them a copy, edit it and hopefully put a selection online and broadcast them.”

While the scope of this year’s festival is undoubtedly impressive, Dorrington says it’s the workshops that she expects will be the most popular.

This year’s workshops for adults – there are also a number for children – include a comprehensive, full-day seminar showing emerging authors how to get published, and various other shorter sessions covering creative writing, biography and memoir, crime writing, editing and characterisation.

“The workshops are always very popular and they sell the quickest,” Dorrington says.

And come 7pm on Monday, March 1, when the last event – a closing address by Barry Lopez – ends, how quickly will Dorrington’s mind turn that very agreeable dilemma of who to invite next year?

“I’m already playing around with ideas for 2011,” she says. “They’re very abstract at the moment but there are some leads I’ll start following more seriously around the end of March. I’ll go east and meet with publishers, and see if there’s anything happening internationally. It’s a year-round process.”

The Perth Writers Festival is running as part of the Perth International Arts Festival from February 26 to March 1 at UWA. For more information, visit perthfestival.com.au/Events/perth-writers-festival