Auckland Writers Festival

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 Our annual sell-out smorgasbord of stories – invariably funny, moving, and rousing – signals the start of three days of public programming. Eight writers deliver a seven-minute true story, propless and scriptless, inspired by the theme Altered States. Don’t miss the literary gymnastics of Chilean/Canadian playwright, actor, memoirist and former revolutionary Carmen A...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 In 2015 more than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe, most fleeing the war-torn region of Syria. The exodus is ongoing. Meanwhile, Donald Trump argues for a wall across the border of the US and Mexico, and closer to home Australia operates one of the harshest border policies in the world. How porous should borders be? Do nations have the right to ref...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 New Zealand’s pre-eminent advocate, Sir Peter Williams QC, recalls the people and cases that have defined his remarkable career. Ronald Jorgensen, Arthur Allan Thomas, “Mr Asia”, James K Baxter, Winston Peters and many more will be discussed, as will his enduring commitment to justice and penal reform as canvassed in his memoirPeter Williams: The Dwarf Who Moved. A c...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 The quest for justice has seldom been more grippingly documented than in the book This House of Grief. The Australian novelist, essayist, screenwriter and journalist Helen Garner witnessed the trial of Robert Farquharson, charged with murdering his three children by drowning. This is not her first attempt to grapple with complex issues of justice and truth – Joe Cinq...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 Clever, provocative and fun, the work of UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy is the perfect counter to anyone who would deny the allure of poetry. One of the most influential poets of the day, Duffy writes for children and adults alike, champions language and teaches English at Manchester University besides. She speaks with John Campbell about her life in letters and re...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 We’re witnessing wild times in the world of media when traditional models are beseiged by technological advances and decreasing revenues, not to mention spurned by the digital generation. Ken Auletta – “Annals of Communications” writer in The New Yorker and author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It – is well placed to fathom it all, from the influence of...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 Kim Thúy and her family fled Vietnam as boat people, arriving in Canada via a refugee camp when she was ten. With a previous career as a restaurateur and with degrees in law, linguistics and translation, she has now authored two poetic novels: Ru which mirrors her refugee experience and Mãn, a tale of love, homeland and identity. The vivacious and thoughtful Thúy dis...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 Canadian Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel Station Eleven was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Awards. In it, the world is decimated by influenza and a Shakespearean troupe with the motto “Survival is insufficient” hits the road to cheer up unlucky survivors. Exploring notions of art and kinship and the cyclical nature of life, as well as yearning, the apocal...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 Tim Winton is a leading exponent of short and long form fiction. Most recently the Guardian reviewed his novel Eyrie as “a superb tale of disillusionment and redemption, loss and beauty” – a description that could equally apply to his other novels including Cloud Street, Dirt Music, The Turning and Breath. Fiction aside, Winton has written on class, hospitals and the...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 “Our most irresistible literary critic,” says The New York Times Book Review. Daniel Mendelsohn is an elegant stylistic polymath – a reviewer but also an essayist, memoirist, classicial scholar and translator of the Greek poet CP Cavafy. In his memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million he excavates his family history; in his essay collection Waiting For The Ba...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 Anthony Horowitz mines the world of spooks and gumshoes to craft great books. Creator of The Diamond Brothers, Alex Rider and The Power of Five (aka The Gatekeepers) series for younger readers, and the author of Conan Doyle estate-approved novels The House of Silkand Moriarty for grown-ups, he also writes extensively for television including for cosies Poirot, Midsom...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 English historian, poet, naturalist and illustrator Helen Macdonald once bred hawks for Arab sheikhs. She is also the winner of the Costa Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction for H is for Hawk, a chronicle of her attempt to tame Mabel the goshawk as a means of assuaging grief after the death of her father. “Grief,” she writes, “is just love with nowhere...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 Atul Gawande writes profoundly about medicine. He’s a surgeon, author, researcher (with a particular interest in patient safety and care) and staff writer for The New Yorker. Being Mortal is his fourth book, and in it he wrestles as a clinician and as a son with dilemmas concerning end-of-life care. In conversation with Middlemore Hospital ICU specialist David Galler...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 Not long ago Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri caused a stir, writing in the Guardian that black and African writers should “not be expected to write about slavery, poverty or racial injustice. The greatest literature comes not from the heaviest subjects but from freedom of thought.” Okri has written many poetry, essay and short story collections, as well as ten no...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 Former Wallaby lock, newspaper columnist, broadcaster and author Peter FitzSimons joins us from Sydney to talk about his latest bookGallipoli, alongside other work including his biographies of the Second World War Two spook Nancy Wake and the authority-averse Ned Kelly. He will also expound on his “little theories of life”. The frisky FitzSimons is joined by Graeme H...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 English comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes would rather we not see “Ancient Rome as a toga party to which our invitation went astray.” An Ancient Guide to the Modern Life is her manifesto for the relevance of classics to the 21st century. In a similar vein her novel,The Amber Fury, brings teenage and Greek angst together in an Edinburgh classroom. Haynes takes to...

An irreverent and stinging session should be forthcoming as Steve Braunias, author of Mad Men, and David Slack, Metro contributor, gather with writer and editor Stephen Stratford to discuss satirical writing.

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 C.K. Stead is one of New Zealand’s foremost literary figures. A distinguished novelist, literary critic, poet, essayist and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland, Stead has won many awards and fellowships. He became a Member of the Order of New Zealand in 2007, and is one of only two living writers to hold that honour. Internationally published...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 One of the world’s leading investigative journalists, Nick Davies broke the phone hacking story in the UK, worked with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange to publish classified material in the Guardian and has recently authored the bestselling Hack Attack. He joins New Zealand Herald columnist Toby Manhire to discuss media ethics, journalistic malpractice and more besides. Sup...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 Critics occupy an uncomfortable position, often finding themselves in the firing line from all sides: too harsh, too fawning, not constructive enough. But just what is the job of a critic? What value do they add? And what makes a good or a bad critic? International Shakespeare critic Peter Holland and New Zealand art critic Wystan Curnow front up for a discussion wit...

Auckland Writers Festival 2015 Playwright, novelist, poet, memoirist and blogger Renée has documented New Zealand’s social history in the latter part of the twentieth century in acclaimed work including Wednesday To Come and Setting The Table. Of Scots and Ngati Kahungunu descent, Renée blogs weekly, and publishes her new novel – a trilogy – chapter by chapter online. She talks with Stephanie John...