On Saturday the Wollongong Town Hall is hosting Live & Local, an all-day event that features a mix of in-person readings and panels as well as live streaming of sessions from the Sydney Writers' Festival.

The live stream sessions include discussions with Ben Okri as well as a range of panels featuring the likes of Annabel Crabb, Michael Connelly, Adam Liaw, Adam Spencer, Jonathan Lethem and David Mitchell.

Wollongong author Jeff Apter is taking part in the local component, giving a reading from his forthcoming biography on the Gibb brothers and taking part in a panel discussing the topic of My Region and asking "where or what is the literary centre for writers who live regionally".

Apter, who largely writes biographies of musicians, says he doesn't find his writing is dependent on his locality.

"Place doesn't affect what I do because I'm working with facts and I'm working in non-fiction.

"I had a working career in Sydney that I brought to Wollongong.

"The geography didn't really have much effect on it, but I am really interested to hear what the other panellists have to say about what is the literary centre for people writing in this area."

However, he has found that "little nuggets" of Wollongong do tend to appear in his writings more since he moved here.

"When I was doing the Johnny O'Keefe book it turned out that his first out-of-Sydney gig was in Wollongong at what used to be a theatre but is now the Myer building," Apter says.

"It was a big thing - 'wow, you're out of Sydney'. He got mobbed here, it was madness.

"O'Keefe was playing a support for Little Richard and O'Keefe's guitarist at the time was an Indonesian guy.

"When he got out of the van and unloaded his gear all the kids gathered around because they thought he was Little Richard.

"They chased him down Crown Street and he was shouting, 'I'm not the guy you think I am!'.

"I got an email a while ago from a friend, who said 'you're doing a book on the Gibbs, did you know they used to play at the Scarborough Hotel?'.

"So there's an accidental history of a lot of the people that I write about in this area because of its proximity to Sydney."

For Apter, writers' festivals are a little bit like rock festivals, where he acts like a punter and goes through the program ticking which "performers" he wants to see.

But having been a "performer" at a few himself, Apter says there are real benefits for a writer.

"It gives you a sense of legitimacy, that's what it does," he says.

"Writers work in isolation - I spend 90 per cent of my time in a darkened room. Then, when you get into an environment, not just with other writers, but with people who are really interested in words and writing, it's really good.

"It gets you out of that narrow cocoon in which you tend to work," he says.

"Also, all you hear about is the death knell of the publishing industry, but the reading industry seems to be in pretty good shape." GLEN HUMPHRIES