Caro Llewellyn has written books, run writers festivals of all shapes and sizes, and seen her name appear on the Stella prize shortlist. In July, her career will take another major step – as the new head of Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre.

Llewellyn will take over from Michael Williams, who stepped down in March after a decade as director of the centre for books, writing and ideas.

Llewellyn said taking on the role of CEO of the 12-year-old Melbourne institution in a “milestone year” was a catalyst for fresh thinking about the direction of the organisation.

“It makes everyone think, where do we want to be? What do our next 10 years look like?

“Of course there’s challenges in the time of Covid-19, but I always see challenges as great opportunities,” Llewellyn told Guardian Australia. “It’s a really exciting opportunity and there’s so many wonderful things that we can do.”

Books and writing were also “critical” to this political and social moment, both in terms of the pandemic and in the renewed international discourse around race relations, she said.

“There’s never a moment in time when we can do without books and writing and debate.

“This is a moment when we are grappling with very difficult and very complicated social, political, economic and personal politics, and the more that we can sit down, reflect, think, and discuss the better.”

The Wheeler Centre’s staple offering has been year-round live events both at its State Library home and across the city. It administers the Victorian Premier’s literary prizes, hosts a number of literary organisations in its offices, and runs residency programs for emerging writers.

Since the Covid-19 shutdowns in March, its in-person events have been suspended, although its podcasts and broadcasts series have been continuing via digital mediums.

Llewellyn had also been exercising her programming skills independently during the shutdowns, creating Together-Remotely – a ticketed online literary festival featuring writers such as Colum McCann, Andrew Sean Greer, Polly Samson, Ailsa Piper, and Christos Tsiolkas.

Created from a 3am spark of inspiration, Together-Remotely speedily evolved into a professional – and paying – online events series.

“I have always felt passionately about the fact that we have to pay everybody,” Llewellyn said, lamenting what she called a “terrible slide” towards the expectation that content provided on the internet will not require payment, and that writers ought to turn up to talk about their work for no fee.

“I have a deep philosophical problem with that,” she said. “Nobody else turns up to work for free.”

Together-Remotely was such a success, she said, that it was going to continue – albeit with new management arrangements, given her new job.

“I’ve had amazing feedback from people in rural and regional areas – that they can’t get to events in the city, and certainly not of the calibre of writers that we were hosting,” she said.

That Llewellyn could throw together such a high-profile list of authors so quickly is a consequence of a long, international career in books, beginning as a publicist for Random House, before taking on the role of artistic director and CEO of Sydney Writers’ festival in 2002.

Four years later, she was off to New York to run the PEN World Voices festival, followed by the New Literature from Europe festival in the same city, and the Festival des Écrivains du Monde for Columbia University in Paris. She returned to Melbourne in 2017 and has been working at Museums Victoria since.

In 2019, she published Diving Into Glass, a memoir about her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and its aftermath, which took her 15 years to write. It was shortlisted for this year’s Stella prize.

She said she hopes to expand the Wheeler Centre’s offerings, especially for regional and rural communities, and that this will happen in person as soon as possible.

“I’ve just sung the praises of online platforms but I think there’s nothing that replaces being able to shake the hand or get a book signed from your literary heroine. So we definitely want to get back into doing live events as soon as we possibly can. But obviously we have to be guided by the government on what that looks like,” she said.