Auckland Writers Festival

In Island Time Damon Salesa argues that while NZ has passively allowed a tacit segregation to take hold between Pakeha and Pasifika, the future of this country is Pacific, whether we are ready or not. Setting a course through the “islands” of Pacific life in NZ – Ōtara, Tokoroa, Ōamaru and beyond – Salesa envisions a country becoming “even more Pacific by the hour” and challenges us, in this year’...

Big thinking philosopher A. C. Grayling has ranged widely in his books to date, among them: Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggle for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West; Liberty in the Age of Terror; The God Argument; and The Age of Genius and Democracy and Its Crisis. He is the founder of the private New College of the Humanities in London, an inveterate traveller and compelling...

The Times has said of Susie Boyt that “she writes with great precision and wisdom about the human heart under duress”. Her six novels include Love & Fame (a complex and witty exploration of grief), and The Small Hours (a psychological study set in a nursery school). The acclaimed author and Financial Times columnist has also recently edited The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories by Henry Ja...

Praised as ingenious by The New Yorker for its “technical artistry with an unfettered emotional directness” Jenny Zhang’s debut short-story collection Sour Heart interrogates the immigrant experience in eight linked stories told from the perspective of a first-generation, Chinese-American girl living in New York, and was the first acquisition of Lena Dunham’s publishing imprint Lenny Books. It fol...

Labelled by Vulture as one of the most exciting debuts of 2017, and by Bustle as one of the most anticipated feminist releases of the year – alongside work by Rebecca Solnit and Roxane Gay – Durga Chew-Bose’s debut collection of self-referential essays Too Much and Not the Mood has established her as a member of the millennial intelligentsia. Taking its title from a Virginia Woolf diary entry, Che...

Heralded as the Jane Goodall of botany in Science magazine, Hope Jahren is the recipient of three Fulbright scholarships, was named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in 2016, and is the Wilson Professor at the University of Oslo's Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics. Her memoir Lab Girl – a National Book Critics Circle Award winner – is a visceral, funny tale of work and love, her rela...

Freelance journalist Francis Wade has worked extensively in South East Asia and contributed to The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Asia Times Online, the Democratic Voice of Burma and The Los Angeles Review of Books. In his riveting book Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’, he reveals the deep fissures that have spurred mass violence and refugee flight. The b...

Ockham New Zealand Book Award shortlisted Driving to Treblinka is the personal and profound story of journalist Diana Wichtel’s search for her lost father Ben, a Holocaust survivor, who was to follow his wife and children to NZ from Canada in 1964, but never arrived. In the course of Wichtel’s quest she scours the archives, travels the world, and unearths the story of her father and his Warsaw fam...

The life of the foreign correspondent is a fascinating one – forever on the move, often at the coalface of the news cycle, and witnessing the unfolding of history. Freelancer and South East Asian specialist Francis Wade and former China correspondent Madeleine O’Dea, talk with journalist Mike McRoberts.

Anna Karenina, Antigone and the women of Beckett are just some of the roles that Irish actor Lisa Dwan has fashioned as her own in an illustrious theatrical career. As heated debate continues over the position and representation of women on and off the stage and screen, Dwan joins Fiona Samuel for a conversation about towering female literary characters, what they reveal about both the past and cu...

Fiona Farrell’s most recent novel, Decline and Fall on Savage Street, is often referred to as ‘a political novel’. Twin to her highly regarded nonfiction work, The Villa at the Edge of the Empire, the books form a wide-ranging analysis of the response to the Christchurch earthquakes. In this lecture, Farrell considers in general terms the ‘political novel’. What makes a work of fiction ‘political’...

The writing of Witi Ihimaera (Te Aitanga-a-Mahāki, Tūhoe, Te Wha nau-ā-Apanui) has touchd generations of readers. The first Māori writer to publish both a book of short stories and a novel, he has since written more than 30 books for adults and children, as well as screenplays, scripts, essays and libretto. Born in Gisborne, Ihimaera worked in the diplomatic service through the 1970s and 1980s, ev...

By century’s end our landscape will be transformed, and hundreds of millions of people will retreat inland as coasts are inundated. In The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilised World acclaimed journalist and Rolling Stone mildly gonzo contributor Jeff Goodell, travels to 12 countries and reports from the front lines of global warming. The book follows prev...

To The Guardian David Eagleman is “a little bit of a genius”, to The Times he’s “the hottest thing in neuroscience”. He’s an adjunct professor at Stanford University; director of the Centre of Science and Law; co-founder of NeoSensory (a brainy outfit which “creates novel sensory experiences”); and The New York Times bestselling author of non-fiction titles Incognito, The Brain, and The Runaway Sp...

Democracy and Its Crisis is the latest book from leading British intellectual A. C. Grayling. In it he traces democracy’s birth in ancient Greece to its bastardisation in the 21st-century. He delivers a lecture on democracy’s current lowpoint, and the pressing need for reform. Supported by Craigs Investment Partners

From Peep Show to Mitchell and Webb, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Cold Feet, Robert Webb’s screen achievements as a creator, writer and actor have seen him become one of the most recognisable and best-loved faces in British comedy. How Not To Be a Boy is the actor and author’s frank memoir, about a life shadowed by his tempestuous father and the early death of his mother. It’s also a refreshing ru...

Indian MP, former diplomat, contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek International and TIME, and author of 16 books that range across history, culture, literature and politics, Shashi Tharoor has achieved rock star status in India and abroad. He has described India as “not …an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly...

Norwegian literary phenomenon Karl Ove Knausgård leapt to notice with his arresting cycle of six autobiographical novels My Struggle (Min Kamp), described by The Paris Review as “extreme in its candor, by turns earnest and satiric, attentive to the minutiae of postmodern family life”. His latest works are a contemplative four-volume series named after the seasons and inspired by the birth of his d...

“In the afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence; or you may find the afterlife contains only people whom you remember. In some afterlives you may be split into all your different ages, or forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been.” Lauded by fans – including Brian Eno, Philip Pullman and Geoff Dyer – for...

In her most ambitious book to date, Ockham New Zealand Book Awards shortlisted Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds, Anne Salmond reframes our understanding of NZ. Beginning with the earliest encounters between Māori and European New Zealanders, Salmond suggests that the legacy of those clashes and exchanges provides us with an opportunity to rethink our relationship to the waterways, the lan...

The Emmy-winning Veep, the Bafta-winning The Thick of It, and Little Englander Alan Partridge are just some of the satirical creations of the writer, producer and director Armando Iannucci. The sharp Glaswegian greatly admires Charles Dickens, Woody Allen and the Pope, but not former UK prime minister, the “bum-faced southern ponce” David Cameron. His current projects include a movie about Stalin’...

AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL 2017 For many women 2016 registered as an annus horribilis, one which made it clear that the battle for sexual equality – in political and sporting circles notably – is anything but won. Writers and advocates Michele A’Court, Roxane Gay and Mpho Tutu van Furth suggest courses of required action. Susie Ferguson in the chair.

AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL 2017 Praised as a ‘sublime’ writer by The Guardian, the Nigerian-American writer, art historian, photographer and champion of the artistic merits of Twitter, Teju Cole, has wide-ranging pre-occupations. His novel Open City explores spatial relations, immigrant experience and Manhattan bird life, and has attracted comparisons to the work of W.G. Sebald. His essay collectio...

In January this year the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, creators of the Doomsday Clock, assessed the world to be 30 seconds closer to annihilation due to threats posed by climate change and nuclear weapons, as well as strident nationalism, fake news, and an intemperate Donald Trump. Chair of the Bulletin’s science and security board, theoretical physicist and author of The Greate...

AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL 2017 ​Described as radical and gossipy when published 20 years ago, writer and critic Chris Kraus’ novel I Love Dick, set in New Zealand and New York, has turned out to have enduring clout, netting fans such as Lena Dunham with its confessional format and its interrogation of misogyny. The book is now a television pilot, directed by Emmy-winner Jill Soloway and featuring...