Auckland Writers Festival

As the power struggle between China and the United States intensifies and questions of Chinese interference in New Zealand and the Pacific are raised in academic and political circles, journalist Richard McGregor fathoms the geo-political climate and the balance of power in our region. McGregor has worked as a Financial Times correspondent in China, wrote The Party: The Secret World of China’s Com...

Mary Norris’ New York Times bestseller Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen gives an account of the author’s years in The New Yorker’s copy department. Now she returns with Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen, a witty romp around language, love, and the crystalline Greek coast, along which she adventured. She speaks with Adam Dudding. Supported by Platinum Bold Patrons Josephine &...

“It’s a terrible thing being a biographer,” Artemis Cooper has said. “One is such a rat.” A consummate inquisitor of the talented, Cooper’s subjects have included food guru Elizabeth David,novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, and travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose last book she co-edited with Colin Thubron. She is also the author of Cairo in the War, 1939-1945, co-author with her husband Antony...

THE MICHAEL KING MEMORIAL LECTURE 2019 Although the New Zealand Wars (1845-1872) have profoundly shaped our country they have been little acknowledged, taught and understood. Historian Vincent O’Malley presents an introduction to the causes, course and consequences of these defining conflicts fought between groups of Māori and the Crown in his book The New Zealand Wars: Ngā Pakanga O Aotearoa. He...

The results of the 2017 New Zealand election campaign reverberated around the world, changing the course of this country’s politics and ringing in generational change. Political scientist Stephen Levine’s book Stardust & Substance is an examination of legacy, politics and promise, recounting perspectives from key campaign players including now Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who joins Toby Manhire f...

Markus Zusak is one of Australia’s most successful exports, a six-time novelist best known for The Book Thief, an international smash hit also adapted for the screen. Ten years on, his highly anticipated follow-up arrives – the ambitious, suburban epic, Bridge of Clay, described by The Guardian as ”brilliantly illuminated… affirmatively full of life”. The book celebrates both the ordinary and the...

Andrew Sean Greer’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Less has amassed a legion of fans, among them Ann Patchett, David Sedaris, and Armistead Maupin. The judges declared it “A generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love.”The same could be said of Greer’s five other works of fiction: tales that joust playfully w...

Convulsive changes in journalism following the advent of the Internet have exposed the editorial/business divide, and spawned ethical dilemmas. Navigating these choppy seas is the first female executive editor of The New York Times, Jill Abramson, who was fired in 2014 after less than three years in the job. In her new book Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts she inves...

Superstar neuroscientist David Eagleman’s latest book, co-authored with composer Anthony Brandt, is The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes The World. In it, the pair weave together the sciences and the arts to explore human inventiveness, and put the case for novelty. Join Eagleman, Creative Fellow of the Creative Thinking Project based at The University of Auckland, in this one-off lec...

Legendary musician, documentary maker and feature writer Moana Maniapoto (Ngāti Tūwharetoa/Tu hourangi-Ngāti Wahiao) joins Tama Waipara in the Heartland Festival Room for an hour of chat and music. With her band Moana & the Tribe she has performed around the world, sharing her “blend of traditional and contemporary styles without compromising either” (The New Zealand Herald) with lyrics rooted in...

The divine Muriel Spark is one of Scotland’s most revered writers, with legions of fans that include such luminaries as Ian Rankin, Alexander McCall Smith and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. On the occasion of the hundred-year anniversary of her death, literary editor and friend Alan Taylor delivers Appointment in Arezzo, an intimate, fond and funny memoir – full of colour and indiscretion – of on...

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by NZ expat-Bulgarian Kapka Kassabova is described by the LA Review of Books as “that rarest of things: a travel book with a conscience that is also a compendium of wonders”. It has won the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year, the Scottish Book of the Year, and been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Baillie Gifford Non-Ficti...

Best-selling author Karen Joy Fowler is a maverick, with novels and short stories spanning science fiction, fantasy and literary fiction, including the Man Booker Prize finalist We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, The New York Times bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club, and the PEN/Faulkner fiction finalist Sister Noon. She is the co-founder of the James Tiptree Jr. Award – given to works whic...

We live in highly charged times. Since Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual harassment, assault and rape by multiple women, the bastion of male privilege has been under sustained attack by the #METOO and #TIMES UP movements, with a roster of men called out for similar behaviour – not only in Hollywood but in the worlds of politics, media, art, sport, and high-end charity events. Some surprising...

Returning for another extravaganza of spoken-word performance is Best of the Best, showcasing Aotearoa’s poets, in league with international guests. Te Karere Scarborough hosts an evening with John Carr and Jessie Fenton (both winners of Poetry Idol), Daren Kamali (founder of the South Auckland Poets Collective), Vanessa Crofskey (winner of The University of Auckland and Auckland Regional poetry s...

Comedy crafters par excellence Kura Forrester, Peter Helliar, and Oscar Kightley unpick a jokey script in conversation with Kanoa Lloyd. What’s funny, what’s not, and how to tell the difference.

Professor David Christian can navigate our complex 13.7 billion year history in just under 18 minutes. Since the 1980s, the US born, Australian-based scholar of Russian history has promulgated the idea of Big History, a metadiscipline which takes a wide-angle, multidisciplinary approach to history. It has been championed by philanthropist Bill Gates among others, and is now being taught in schools...

The cultural critic Alex Ross is most widely celebrated for his 2007 book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a landmark history of music since 1900. He also has published Listen to This, a collection of his writings for The New Yorker, where he has been the music critic since 1996. For the magazine, he covers classical music from the Metropolitan Opera to the downtown avant-gar...

Bitingly clever satire delivered with a well-timed drollness marked John Clarke’s work which included the black singleted, gumboot-cladded Fred Dagg, the alternative national anthem We Don’t Know How Lucky We Are, the groundbreaking mockumentary The Games, and weekly skits on the absurdities of Australian political life with longtime collaborator Bryan Dawe. To mark his death, and the republicatio...

Singaporean writer Sharlene Teo’s debut novel Ponti won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Foundation Writer’s Award and was praised by Ian McEwan for its “brilliant descriptive power”, and for characters which “glow with life and humour and minutely observed desperation”. Teo sets her twisting and haunting story of an intense and unusual friendship between two women against the humming, shifting atmosp...

One of Barack Obama’s top reads of 2017, Janesville: An American Story, traces the lives of workers and their families, and the response of public and private sectors in the wake of General Motors’ decision to close its Wisconsin assembly plant in 2008. Written by Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post journalist Amy Goldstein, it is essential reading for “anyone who wants to understand the econom...

Celebrated poet, teacher and feminist Choman Hardi arrived in Britain in 1993 seeking asylum from Kurdistan. She attended Oxford, London and Kent Universities, and was a Research Fellow at Oxford, before returning to her home city of Sulaimani in 2014 to teach English, and to found the region’s groundbreaking Center for Gender and Development Studies. Her two poetry volumes include Life for Us, an...

The launch of Selina Tusitala Marsh’s third poetry collection Tightrope, longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, coincided with her taking up the mantle of Poet Laureate – “a wonderful opportunity to extend the poetic page and stage to this nation’s multi-coloured, multi-hued voices”, she said. An extraordinary poet, performer and advocate, Marsh’s work combines a warrior fierceness wit...

Alexander McCall Smith describes Scotland: The Autobiography, 2000 Years of Scottish History By Those Who saw It Happen as an unqualified triumph. Rosemary Goring’s book is composed of eye-witness accounts from Tacitus, Mary Queen of Scots, Oliver Cromwell, Adam Smith, David Livingstone, and The Big Yin, AKA Billy Connolly, but also from crofters, criminals, servants, housewives and poets. Goring...

In his new and controversial book Why I Am a Hindu, writer, Indian MP and former UN Under-Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor offers a re-examination of one of the world’s oldest and greatest religions, and considers its origins, key texts and philosophical concepts, as well as the dangers to a pluralist secular India posed by the new Hindu fundamentalists. Supported by Asia NZ Foundation.