Auckland Writers Festival

The daughter of a South African freedom fighter and an accountant, the writer Sisonke Msimang was born in exile, and has lived on three continents. She has called the dream of freedom a kind of home for her, an idea beautifully expanded upon in her memoir Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home. Now based in Perth and working as an oral storyteller, Msimang has also published The Resurr...

Despite an unwritten rule that authors shouldn’t install writers as characters in their work, in recent times a surfeit of writers as protagonists has appeared. Irishman John Boyne (A Ladder to the Sky), Pulitzer prize-winner Andrew Sean Greer (Less), Chilean Carla Guelfenbein (In The Distance With You) and Ockham NZ Book Awards longlisted Anne Kennedy (The Ice Shelf) come together to discuss writ...

Alexander Chee is variously described as “masterful” (Roxane Gay), “incendiary” (The New York Times) and “brilliant” (The Washington Post). Author of the novels Edinburgh and Queen of the Night, he has now written the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel – shortlisted for the PEN Diamonstein-Vogel Prize for the Art of the Essay. In it he scrutinises the emotional and psychologic...

The Canadian novelist and screenwriter Patrick deWitt is an amusing stylist of the highest order who credits his liking for “inane comedic dialogue” to early and sustained exposure to Monty Python. He has written four novels: Ablutions; The Sisters Brothers, which was made into a film; Undermajordomo Minor; and his latest French Exit, at times “a miniaturist work of howling nihilism” (The New York...

Eight writers, eight seven-minute true stories, no scripts, no props. Toiling for your entertainment and edification this year, and addressing the loose theme of “At The Crossroads”, are John Boyne (Ireland), Roger Hall (NZ), Chessie Henry (NZ), Mika (NZ), Sisonke Msimang (South Africa/AU), Mary Norris (US), Kamila Shamsie (Pakistan/UK) and Jeff Tweedy (US). Supported by Craigs Investment Partners...

From driverless cars to digital assistants, it seems the world of work is on the cusp of a technological revolution that is generating hopes and fears alike. But are the robots really knocking at the door? And what does all this mean for Aotearoa? New Zealand economist Kinley Salmon, a graduate of Cambridge and Harvard universities now working in the United States, tackles these questions in his n...

At a time when economic disparity continues to widen and the health of the planet is under severe threat, many question the tenet that growth is the appropriate measure of economic sustainability and success. British economist Kate Raworth is one such inquisitor. In her book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist – longlisted for the 2017 Financial Times McKinsey Bus...

The creative force behind the genre-defying Chicago alt-rock band Wilco, Jeff Tweedy has recently released his first memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back). Tweedy opens up about his creative process and the people and places that have shaped him. A musical explorer from his early years listening to siblings’ records and playing in bands in high school, Tweedy formed the legendary country-punk band...

More than ever these days, writers’ festivals and literary interviews encourage readers to interest themselves in the lives and thought processes of the novelists and poets whose work they read. Recently, for example, the first volume of a biography of Maurice Shadbolt had been published (Life as a Novel: A Biography of Maurice Shadbolt: Volume One 1932-1973). Most of the information contained wit...

I te tai nui o hiakai ki te reo Māori e pari mai ana, arā tētahi kāhui toka tū moana kua roa e oke ana kia ora ai ko te reo, otirā , ko te ahurea Māori. He mea whakatupu ki te reo Māori, e whitu tau te pakeke o Tā Tīmoti Kāretu nōna ka ako i te reo Pākehā. I āianei nā e matatau ana tē nei toki ki ētahi reo e whā, ā, ko te whānuitanga o ngā rā o tōna ao kua pau i āna whakahekenga tōtā nui kia whaka...

The pre-eminent military historian Antony Beevor attended Sandhurst and served in the 11th Hussars before writing four novels and twelve books of non-fiction (including the gripping Stalingrad and Berlin). In his latest work – Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges 1944 – he has mined Dutch, British, Polish, German, and American archives, and previously overlooked sources, to vividly document heroism...

The Filipino poet and labour organiser Carlos Bulosan, whose family immigrated to America in the Great Depression, entitled his autobiographic novel America Is in the Heart. Elaine Castillo’s fine debut novel “America Is Not the Heart” is a portrait of Filipino diaspora, specifically the migration of three-generations of women to San Francisco’s Bay area – the not so picturesque part. Tender and f...

Last year the film writer and director Taika Waititi sparked debate when he declared New Zealand "racist as f***" and recounted being racially profiled as a teenager. The Human Rights Commission also reports that local instances of racism are on the increase. How do those who have never been subject to racism begin to understand the experiences of those who have? And is there an expectation that t...

The border zone between history and fiction can be dangerous territory. When, if ever, is speculation acceptable? Is invention justified? Can fictionalising history advance the understanding of truth? Pre-eminent British historian Antony Beevor takes on local creative non-fiction writer Joanna Grochowicz and historical fiction novelist Rosetta Allan in a light-hearted consideration of the pros and...

Famed for his 1991 international bestselling novel Generation X which popularised the titular term, the Canadian Douglas Coupland is celebrated both as a writer and an artist. He is often preoccupied with our relationship to work. He has published 13 novels, two short stories collections, seven works of nonfiction (including a biography of the philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who coined the expressio...

The novel Fugitive Pieces is a work of art. It brought author Anne Michaels accolades, and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Michaels has not rested on her laurels, however. She is currently Toronto’s Poet Laureate, and her latest collection of poems All We Saw has garnered rave reviews. Her non-fictional Infinite Gradations is a meditation on art and death. She discusses her life’s writing with Micha...

A giant of New Zealand music, Shayne Carter writes of the people, places and social forces that have shaped him in his autobiography Dead People I Have Known. From the death of a band member, to the halted progress of Straitjacket Fits – the band that was expected to conquer the world with numbers such as “She Speeds”– and his dazzling come-back with the band Dimmer, Carter’s story is a hike throu...

A line-up of Māori writers join forces with multi-instrumentalist Kingsley Melhuish for a night of storytelling interwoven with music, inspired by the new book Pūrākau: Māori Myths Retold. Imagine a sensual retelling of Tāne’s creation of Hine, Māui as a beleaguered sports star, or an Aotearoa where whakapapa is downloaded via app. Join Whiti Hereaka (who edited Pūrākau with Witi Ihimaera), Kelly...

Peter Godfrey-Smith believes that encountering an octopus is the closest we might ever come to meeting an intelligent alien, with its eight tentacles so packed with neurons that they virtually think for themselves. His book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness has been hailed by Talking Heads musician David Byrne as his best read of 2018 and as “entrancing and pr...

Eugenia Cheng’s mission is to rid the world of maths phobia. She holds a doctorate in pure maths from the University of Cambridge University, teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is a concert pianist, founded Liederstube (a non-profit organisation aimed at bringing classical music to a wider audience) and has written three books in which she proselytises the beauty of mathematics...

Former Samoan Head of State (2007- 2017) and Samoan Prime Minister (1976-1982) Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi Efi is a statesman and philosopher and is widely acknowledged in the Pacific as a leading cultural custodian. In several books, including Su’esu’e Manogi: In Search of Fragrance, he has explored and advocated for Samoan indigenous knowledge. He discusses his life and vital scholarship with...

Charles Graeber’s critically acclaimed The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer, chronicles the path to what the 2018 Nobel Prize committee recognised as our “penicillin moment” against cancer when they awarded the Medicine prize to James P. Allison and Tasuku. Variously reviewed as “fascinating and artful” (New York Times) and “deft, detailed, fascinating”(Nature) Graeber’s med...

In 1975 Marilyn Waring was elected to the New Zealand Parliament as the MP for Raglan. Aged just 23 and only the fifteenth woman to enter Parliament, she served through the turbulent years of Muldoon’s government, including as chair of the Public Expenditure Committee, before crossing the floor to support nuclear-free legislation which ultimately led to the fall of the National government. The Pol...

Firmly situated in the canon of Canadian literature, David Chariandy has written three eloquent books. His first two – Soucouyant: A Novel of Forgetting and Brother draw on his Trinidadian heritage, and centre on the fragility of human ties. In Soucouyant a man returns home to care for his mother who has dementia; in Brother two siblings and their mother battle as working-class immigrants in Toron...

A master of moral complexity, Sarah Perry spent her childhood in a strict Baptist community, removed from contemporary culture and steeped in Old English literature and the King James Bible. The upbringing has unsurprisingly deeply influenced her writing style, described as making the reader “alive to the strangeness of the world and of our history” (The DailyTelegraph). The author of three novels...