Auckland Writers Festival

Oceanic women have always been creators – weaving lives into pandanus mats, printing knowledge onto masi and tapa, bearing tatau memory on skin, weaving words in boundless talanoa. A triumph of preeminent Pasifika women – Ockham NZ Book Awards winner Tusiata Avia ('The Savage Coloniser Book'), Selina Tusitala Marsh ('Mophead Tu') and Ockham longlisted Karlo Mila ('Goddess Muscle') – come together...

THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND FREE LECTURE Twenty-two years ago the Auckland Writers Festival burst into literary life, propelled by the ambitious advocacy of writers Stephanie Johnson and the late Peter Wells who wanted to showcase our talent to our people. Johnson takes stock of how the New Zealand literary landscape has changed across the era. Have we grown up, grown out, grown at all? Or are we s...

A heartfelt artistic collaboration, The 33, brings together award-winning poet Anne Kennedy and leading New Zealand pianist and Juilliard graduate Sarah Watkins in a tribute to life, grief, writing and music. In 1973, after the death of her brother Philip, the then 14-year-old Kennedy consoled herself lying on a red rug in the family living room listening to Beethoven’s Thirty-three Variations on...

Writer and filmmaker Barbara Sumner, author of 'Tree of Strangers', argues that adoption laws, which continue to deny adopted people access to their own information, treat mothers as dispensable and children as interchangeable. Introduced by Christine O'Brien. AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL WAITUHI O TĀMAKI 2021

Ordinary men living through extraordinary times, New Zealand soldiers Harold Robinson, Ralph Dyer and Douglas Morison shared a queer identity and a love of performance, living as gay men within the military forces during World War II, and boosting troop morale as female impersonators in wartime concert parties. In the Ockham NZ Book Awards longlisted 'Crossing the Lines', Brent Coutts brings to li...

Many ancestral currents, past and present, carried Pasifika peoples from Te-Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa to Aotearoa. Whilst each Pacific identity is unique, experiences of migration, colonialism, and courage are shared, and vividly expressed in a thriving performance scene. Pasifika playwrights Oscar Kightley and Victor Rodger are just two of the many whose work reflect the Pasifika migrant spirit and the re...

Lawyer and writer Brannavan Gnanalingam is the author of the Ockham NZ Book Awards shortlisted 'Sprigs', a searing interrogation of sexual assault and masculinity. He argues that current cultural norms about being male come at others’ expense, and men must urgently find a new approach. Introduced by Christine O'Brien. AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL WAITUHI O TĀMAKI 2021

In the Ockham NZ Book Awards shortlisted 'This Pākehā Life: An Unsettled Memoir', Alison Jones contests that being Pākehā requires us to live in a state of “permanently lively discomfort with no single resolution...”, a challenge both difficult and wonderful. She puts her case. Introduced by Christine O'Brien. AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL WAITUHI O TĀMAKI 2021

An exceptional evening performance brings together celebrated writers and taonga pūoro practitioners in a lyrical weaving of language and song. Arihia Latham, Anahera Gildea, Becky Manawatu, essa may ranapiri and Tusiata Avia take you on a journey of sound and words, from the distant past to the distant future. Featuring live taonga pūoro from composer, musician and poet Ruby Solly and Arts Laurea...

Writing an honest and deeply personal memoir takes a certain degree of courage, and the journey can be fraught. In Lil O’Brien’s 'Not That I’d Kiss a Girl', she movingly recounts the fallout from her parents’ accidental discovery of her sexual orientation; literary star Charlotte Grimshaw embarks on a search for familial truth and a parental accounting in 'The Mirror Book'; and prizewinning childr...

“A lyrical love letter to the land” is how reviewer Linda Burgess describes Manawatu farmer, poet and performer Tim Saunders’ debut memoir 'This Farming Life'. Further south in Central Otago, novelist, memoirist, poet and essayist Jillian Sullivan walks the hills and mountains of the Ida Valley that surround her home, conjuring her perceptive essay collection 'Map for the Heart'. Both books provid...

Walking can be both a physical and a mental undertaking – a time for gathering thoughts and centering ourselves. For Catharina van Bohemen, her 1998 Camino de Santiago journey, so beautifully depicted in the Ockham NZ Book Awards longlisted 'Towards Compostela: Walking the Camino de Santiago', is a pilgrimage away from a crisis in her marriage towards a greater understanding of self and family; fo...

MICHAEL KING MEMORIAL LECTURE AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL WAITUHI O TĀMAKI 2021 Can we blame Cook for everything that followed? Is it the fault of the Englishman who met his early end in 1779 that Māori are statistically likely to meet an early end in 21st century New Zealand? This is not a biographical or historical lecture about Captain James Cook; nor is it a morbid tale of indigenous destruction...

Helen Kelly lived and died a fighter. The daughter of prominent unionist Pat Kelly and Vietnam activist Catherine Eichelbaum, Kelly was destined for a life of political engagement. She held senior positions in a labour movement that was dominated by men, including serving as the president of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions for many years. Diagnosed with lung cancer, she campaigned for both...

The first essay of filmmaker Ghazaleh Golbakhsh’s collection, 'The Girl From Revolution Road', transports readers to her childhood in Iran and an illicit party where family and friends are drinking and dancing to the Bee Gees before being swooped upon by armed police, detained and, for her father, sentenced to 60 lashes. It’s a collection juxtaposing the riches and challenges of Iranian life along...

A highlight of 2020 was the publication of 'How to Be Happy Though Human', a collection of new and previous work by virtuoso poet Kate Camp, which was published in New Zealand, the United States and Canada. Admired by Poet Laureate Dave Eggleton for its “smouldering slow burn, curdled idealism, the salvation army assembly of humorous perceptions” it ranges across eclectic subject matter “like a bu...

Kaituhi Michelle Rahurahu (Ngāti Rahurahu, Ngāti Tahu-Ngāti Whaoa) argues that story sovereignty, especially for Māori, cannot be maintained by outsider perspectives which use historical rhetoric to solidify harmful stereotypes about Māori lives in the minds of everyday readers. Introduced by Christine O’Brien. AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL WAITUHI O TĀMAKI 2021

Three exceptional writers join chair Paula Morris on screen, for a live-in venue audience, to talk about and read from their latest work and answer your questions. Today’s line-up includes Irish actor and memoirist Gabriel Byrne with 'Walking With Ghosts'; Melbourne-based Māori crime writer JP Pomare with latest thriller 'Tell Me Lies'; and the London-based Caribbean Costa Book of the Year author...

Three exceptional writers join consummate chair Paula Morris on screen, for a live-in-venue audience, to talk about and read from their latest work and answer your questions. Today’s line-up includes expat Miro Bilbrough with her memoir of a 1970s childhood in a Marlborough Sounds commune 'In The Time of the Manaroans'; US fiction doyenne Marilynne Robinson with latest novel 'Jack'; and Booker-pri...

Three exceptional writers join consummate chair Paula Morris on screen, for a live-in-venue audience, to talk about and read from their latest work and answer your questions. Today’s line-up includes Chilean literary legend Isabel Allende with 'The Soul of a Woman', a meditation on power and feminism; UK-based Ockham NZ Book Awards shortlisted poet Mohamed Hassan with his debut collection 'Nationa...

From Pop-art influences to landscape, through advertising and the contested area of Appropriation, much-loved and truly versatile artist Dick Frizzell has always immersed himself in the art around him. In 'Me, According To The History of Art, a journey from cave art through Rubens and Tintoretto to Cezanne and Lichtenstein', Frizzell sets out to track the historical threads that sit within his DNA...

In 2019, Time magazine named Monique Fiso’s (Ngā Rauru, Ngāti Ruanui) Wellington restaurant Hiakai as one of the ‘100 Greatest Places’ in the world – a long way from an after-school job in Porirua as a sandwich hand. Fiso’s incomparable talent has led to work in Michelin-star restaurants, featuring on Netflix’s The Final Table, and receiving praise from publications including the Wall Street Journ...

Writer, singer, musician and lyricist Amanda Palmer has garnered a vibrant cult following for her creative outputs which include New York Times best-selling memoir and manifesto 'The Art of Asking'. She is supported by a circle of almost 15,000 patrons across the globe who micro-fund her writing and work through the Patreon platform. ​​​Slated to finish up an 80-date international tour of her thir...

AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL WAITUHI O TĀMAKI 2021 “In your atlas two islands not in narrow seas, like a child’s kite anchored in the indifferent blue” are the opening lines to Allen Curnow’s 1939 poem 'Not in Narrow Seas'. Over 80 years later the renowned NZ economist and commentator Brian Easton borrows it for the title of his Ockham NZ Book Award longlisted wide-ranging history of New Zealand, vie...

Former Washington Post Beijing bureau chief and 2018 winner of Stanford University’s Shorenstein Journalism Award for outstanding reporting on Asia issues, Anna Fifield, returned home in 2020 to become the editor of Wellington’s Dominion Post. She reflects on her years reporting across eight Asian countries, her insights into North Korea’s leader in her critically acclaimed book 'The Great Success...