Auckland Writers Festival

Author Tessa Duder began her adult life as a representative swimmer, winning a silver medal at the 1958 Cardiff Empire Games in the 110 yards butterfly. This incredible achievement would inspire the Alex Quartet, for which she is probably best known. Loved by generations of teenagers, and garnering Duder three New Zealand Children’s Book of the Year awards and three Esther Glen medals, it was adap...

Shaped by the forces of 1970s Ireland and by a mother raging against her hemmed-in life, broadcaster, writer and podcaster Noelle McCarthy escaped Ireland for party town Auckland in the early 2000s – seeking a new world far away from the cultural fabric of her homeland. Many years later, and now a mother herself and a recovering alcoholic, she returns to bid her mother farewell and to reckon with...

The traditions of fable and myth – Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the tales of Aesop and Grimm, Homer’s Iliad and the pūrākau of Polynesia, to name a few – have acted as compasses for millennia, exploring human experience and answering timeless questions. Join two contemporary writers at the height of their powers – Commonwealth Prize winner and Man Booker-shortlisted Lloyd Jones ('The Fish') and 2022 Ockh...

Breathtaking in scope, ambition and artistry, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki’s’ 2020-2021 survey exhibition of Māori contemporary art from 1950s to present day, Toi Tu- Toi Ora broke all attendance records and forged new ways of presenting and understanding Māori art. It was also the touchpoint for a critical conversation about who should lead and author such projects. Curated by artist and cur...

In 2010, the National Government signed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, joining more than 140 other countries; in 2019 the Labour Government set up a working group tasked with creating a plan to realise that commitment. The result is He Puapua, a discussion document whose title refers to the break between waves and evokes the concept of a disruption to political and legisla...

Of 2021 Nobel Prize-winning writer Abdulrazak Gurnah’s book 'By the Sea', The Times said, “Rarely in a lifetime can you open a book and find that reading it encapsulates the enchanting qualities of a love affair... one scarcely dares breathe while reading it for fear of breaking the enchantment.” It’s a sentiment that could be applied across all his fiction and essays, including Booker-shortlisted...

Russia’s waging of war in Ukraine brings back to Europe scenes of aggression and devastation not seen there for decades. It’s one of the many instances of warfare in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, deploying both traditional and thoroughly modern weapons. David Kilcullen is a former soldier and diplomat, a strategist, counterinsurgency expert and author whose books include The Dragons and...

Three generations of talented poets come together to share work from their new collections, and to talk with each other about the literary influences, inheritances and preoccupations that have informed their practice. What connects them and what separates them? Kevin Ireland brings us Just Like That: New Poems; Anne Kennedy, the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards-shortlisted The Sea Walks into a...

There’s no such thing as a new idea, but what happens when your writing draws on the people in your life – and what happens when they don’t want to be written about? Taking as inspiration the ‘Bad Art Friend’ tussle over telling someone else’s story that dominated literary conversations in the US last October, join: Madeleine Chapman, editor of 'The Spinoff' and author of books on Jacinda Ardern a...

Clementine Ford is one of Australia’s most fearless feminists, and possibly one of its most provocative. The author of the best-selling 'Fight Like A Girl' and 'Boys Will Be Boys' has been an ardent champion for girls and women, a fierce critic of toxic masculinity, and the target of extraordinary vitriol – which, from time to time, has elicited incendiary responses that she has later regretted. H...

From the pen of historical fiction doyenne Jenny Pattrick, one of this country’s bestselling novelists with books including 'The Denniston Rose' and 'Heart of Coal', comes this year’s 'Harbouring'. The story begins in 1839 as Welsh foundry worker Huw Pengellin embarks with his family on a journey of hope, enticed by Colonel Wakefield’s plans to take settlers to the distant shores of New Zealand. O...

“A gripping study of the collateral damage caused by government decision making in war... an expertly researched study of government duplicity,” said The Australian of Stephen Davis’ book Operation Trojan Horse. In 1990 British Airways Flight 149 departed Heathrow airport, destined for Kuala Lumpur. Instead it stopped to refuel in Kuwait as Iraqi troops amassed on the border – despite intelligence...

Meet the disruptors: Māori journalists helping to lead and shape more nuanced conversation on the issues of the day through a Māori lens. Exploring questions of media power and influence, our line-up includes long-time Radio Waatea host and 'E-Tangata' writer Dale Husband (Ngāti Maru) alongside three fearless wāhine broadcasters and writers: Mihingarangi Forbes (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Paoa), the a...

In A.C. Grayling’s view, three of the biggest challenges facing the world today are climate change, the rate of development in high-impact technologies and the global deficit of social and economic justice. He contends that our problems and our technologies are currently outstripping our moral and political capacity to deal with them. In this talk Grayling, whose latest book is 'For the Good of th...

Mohamed Hassan’s life has taken him from Cairo to New Zealand and on to Istanbul and London, covering the Middle East, Turkey and Asia Pacific as a journalist. Through it all he has developed a keen eye for questions of identity and culture, which he beautifully brings to bear in his non-fiction essay collection 'How to Be a Bad Muslim'. Ranging across surveillance, migration, language, Islamophob...

In the gladiatorial arena of film direction, where women have often been treated as invisible, New Zealand auteur Jane Campion has blazed a pioneering trail. The first woman to win the Palme d’Or for The Piano, and the second to ever be nominated for a directing Oscar, Campion’s latest triumph is The Power of the Dog, inspired by Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name. Winning her a legion of...

Sociologist Joanna Kidman (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa) and historian Vincent O’Malley make a formidable team, as partners in life and scholarship. They both contributed to the recently published 'Fragments from a Contested Past: Remembrance, Denial and New Zealand History', and co-lead the Marsden Fund project – 'He Taonga te Wareware?: Remembering and Forgetting Difficult Histories in Aotearo...

Raised in the projects of Washington DC by a father born 35 years after the abolition of slavery and who was barred from school, Harold Hillman is an author and international business and leadership coach whose family legacy is just one of the experiences that have shaped his life. Attending college, where he first encountered white people, he obtained a PhD in Psychology, married, had two childre...

She’s a global sensation – the bestselling Australian author of ten engaging novels including 'Big Little Lies' and 'Nine Perfect Strangers', both of which attracted Nicole Kidman’s interest and have been made into smash-hit television series. Liane Moriarty has sold more than 20 million copies of her books, the latest of which is Apples Never Fall. It’s a witty and substantive study of family dyn...

Expect the unexpected from a sparkling showcase of talented writers in our much-loved Festival Gala storytelling event, now into its 12th iteration and still serving up surprise and delight. Eight writers each take to the stage to share a seven-minute true and personal tale, without prop or script, inspired by this year’s evocative prompt – Across The Divide. Braving the spotlight is: ex-military...

Wāhine toa Lana Lopesi and Coco Solid aka Jessica Hansell (Ngāpuhi) join forces for a proudly strident hour of conversation on their latest books and preoccupations. 'How to Loiter in a Turf War' is a genre-bending work of fiction from Solid, one of Aotearoa’s fiercest and most versatile artists across rap, art, film, performance and writing. The 2022 Ockham NZ Book Awards-longlisted 'Bloody Woman...

Abbas Nazari was just seven when his family, fearing Taliban persecution, fled Afghanistan, embarking on a desperate and dangerous journey that ultimately lead him to New Zealand. Crammed with more than 400 other asylum seekers on a sinking fishing boat in the Indian Ocean, they were saved by cargo ship Tampa in a dramatic rescue. After being rejected by Australia, some of the group including Naza...

What is the job of a Poet Laureate, and is it more complicated for those that “walk in and out of several worlds each day” as the United States’ Laureate of Native American descent Joy Harjo so eloquently puts it? Aotearoa’s first Pasifika Poet Laureate, Selina Tusitala Marsh, joins the current and second Pasifika writer to hold the tokotoko, David Eggleton, for a discussion on poetry and power, p...

After fleeing from Iran in 2013, Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani became a political prisoner, detained indefinitely in legal limbo in the Australian-run Manus Regional Processing Centre, Papua New Guinea. On a smuggled mobile phone, he chronicled six years of survival and witness, tapped out in Farsi in a series of single messages, and subsequently translated into English by Omid Tofig...

Every biographical portrait is a singular take on its subject, and Ockham NZ Book Award shortlisted 'Ralph Hotere: The Dark Is Light Enough' is writer Vincent O’Sullivan’s unique homage to his friend and fellow cultural traveller Ralph Hotere (Te Aupouri, Te Rarawa). Written at the invitation of the artist and crafted through personal conversations, as well as access to whānau and papers, the book...