Auckland Writers Festival

AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL 2017 According to science writer and polymathic thinker James Gleick, H.G. Wells was the first to combine the words ‘time’ and ‘travel’, thus creating an entirely new mode of thought. Gleick’s latest book Time Travel: A History distils literary criticism, philosophy, and physics in an investigation of our obsession with the moving, bending and twisting of time. With Graem...

Lloyd Geering and A.N. Wilson both know The Bible inside out. Geering is widely recognised as one of this country’s leading biblical scholars, and Wilson wrote The Book of the People: How To Read The Bible. They discuss the big book, its provenance and power, with Hannah August. AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL 2017

Ireland’s Fiction Laureate Anne Enright writes unsentimentally on the family unit, and the tidal pull it exerts. Her latest book The Green Road is an exploration of a clan reunion, during which the complicated matriarch takes to her bed –the “horizontal solution” comments her son. Enright, writes James Wood in The New Yorker, is an unusual talent: “She is a rich lyrical prose writer, who cascades...

The hit of the WORD Christchurch Writers Festival in 2016, Canadian performer, writer and filmmaker Ivan Coyote is one of the funniest and provocative storytellers around, grappling with questions of identity, gender, family, and social justice. The author of numerous books including latest Tomboy Survival Guide, “Coyote is to Canadian literature what k.d. lang is to country music: a beautifully o...

At 99 years of age, theologian Lloyd Geering has lived a full and engaged life which has shaped beliefs that range across life after death, the fallibility of The Bible, the divinity of Jesus, the evils of fundamentalism and the ethical requirement to care for the planet. From his early days in Rangiora to a ministry in the Presbyterian Church, a controversial heresy trial, and a distinguished tea...

Stan Grant wrote Talking to My Country in the wake of fans’ abuse of Aboriginal Sydney Swans’ footballer Adam Goodes in 2015. His book is a personal and powerful response to racism in Australia from one of its most successful journalists, and Wiradjuri tribesman. With a direct gaze Grant examines the “deep wound” that he attributes to dispossession, manifest in Indigenous Australians’ low life exp...

New Zealander Max Harris is on the ascendant: a Rhodes Scholar who, while studying public policy and law at Oxford University earned an All Souls Fellowship and returns home for the Festival to advocate a new politics. In his recently published book The New Zealand Project, he argues that academics and intellectuals have failed to deepen the political discourse, that politics is dominated by pragm...

Writer Hera Lindsay Bird burst onto the literary scene with her 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards shortlisted eponymous poetry collection. Bill Manhire, whose latest collection is Some Things to Place in a Coffin, has made a unique contribution to the canon of NZ poetry, and to the literary landscape more generally. With Paris-based NZ poet Andrew Johnston they discuss the development of the cou...

Paris-based Australian author Caroline Brothers bears witness to the cost of human conflict. A former foreign correspondent, she has written War and Photography: A Cultural History, and two unsentimental and powerful novels which examine displacement: The Memory Stones, which begins with the Argentinian military coup of 1976 and tells the story of the Disappeared, and Hinterland, which follows two...

Three times Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Thomas Friedman is a foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, and the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem, The World is Flat, The Lexus and the Olive Grove and his latest, Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. He takes the Auckland stage fresh from interviewing Bill Gates at the CEOs Summit in Se...

Auckland University emeritus psychology professor and Rutherford Medal recipient Michael Corballis has spent a career researching the human mind. In his new book The Truth About Language: What It Is and Where It Came From he takes on Noam Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould to argue that language evolved much earlier than generally assumed. He puts his case to Siouxsie Wiles. AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL 2...

A novelist, memoirist and journalist “who writes sagely and elegantly about food, family, culture, technology and money” (The New York Times) John Lanchester is the author of four novels, including The Debt to Pleasure, and Capital (now a BBC television series), and the bluffer’s guide How To Speak Money, a demystification of the workings of the global economy and the financial markets. He has bee...

Pre-eminent Shakespearean scholar, Columbia University professor James Shapiro convinces that Shakespeare matters. His books include 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, and 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. His Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? dealt definitively to the baloney peddled by authorship conspiracists. The most accessible of Bardologists is in conversati...

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of the groundbreaking Backlash Susan Faludi has now produced a memoir. In 2004, she received an email – with the subject line “Changes” – from her long-estranged Hungarian father telling her he had undergone gender-reassignment surgery and changed his name from Steven to Stephanie. In the Darkroom is the sometimes funny, often painful tale of a father a...

Lincoln in the Bardo is the long-awaited genre-busting first novel from Syracuse University professor George Saunders, a multi-faceted writer with a back catalogue of acclaimed short stories and widely considered to be one of the best contemporary writers working today. At the dawn of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln is grieving the death of his 11-year-old son Willie, who is trapped in a transitiona...

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers Britain, Germany and Russia were ruled by three cousins: George V; Wilhelm II; and Nicholas II. They presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of one of the deadliest conflicts in history. Miranda Carter, author of The Three Emperors, scrutinises the trio and their times. Supported by Heartland Bank AUCKLAND...

NPR Shanghai correspondent Rob Schmitz has created an unforgettable portrait of modern China through the eyes of an array of real-life people living along a single street in Shanghai in his book Street of Eternal Happiness. From Zhao the shopkeeper to Auntie Fu, a fervent capitalist, and musician and café owner CK, here are stories that provide a tale of 21st century China, its multi-layered past...

As a writer and advocate Dame Fiona Kidman has contributed an astonishing amount to NZ literature. Born in Hawera in 1940, she has published more than 30 works – fiction, non-fiction, short stories, poetry, plays – and has been a script writer, radio producer, journalist and librarian. She has won several national and international awards, holds both an Order of the British Empire and a NZ Order o...

The singer Annie Lennox praised The Book of Forgiving for its “groundbreaking insights as to how we resolve our lifelong burdens”. Mpho Tutu van Furth who co-authored the book with her father, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is no stranger to heavy loads: her father was a leading opponent of apartheid in South Africa, and she herself was forced to relinquish the Anglican priesthood over her same-sex marr...

The Wish Child – ‘a brilliant, brilliant novel…a masterpiece’ (Radio NZ) – is the long-awaited fourth book of Catherine Chidgey. Set in Nazi Germany and told from the perspective of two children and a mysterious narrator, it earned Chidgey the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Acorn Foundation Fiction prize. Chidgey’s previous novels are In a Fishbone Church, The Transformation, and Golden Deeds...

A must-read cultural critic, Roxane Gay’s writing is marked by directness, intelligence and wit. She followed her best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist – dubbed by Time magazine as “a manual on how to be human” – with the novel An Untamed State, set in Haiti, her parents’ birthplace. Her latest work, the story collection Difficult Women, illuminates the lives of more than 20 resilient women....

The British biographer, historian, novelist, journalist, essayist A.N. Wilson has an all-encompassing temporal and spiritual beat – from Jesus, Paul (the apostle), Milton, Dante, Tolstoy, Queen Victoria, Josiah Wedgwood, Hitler, Iris Murdoch and C.S. Lewis to, most recently, the explorers aboard Captain Cook’s Resolution. Wilson is in erudite discussion with Simon Wilson. AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL...

In Paul Beatty’s Man Booker Prizewinning novel, The Sellout, the hero – a grower of artisanal marijuana and water melons – attempts to reintroduce slavery and segregation in his LA neighbourhood. Beatty’s savage satire, reflecting as is does the hypocrisies of contemporary America, often reads like reportage. Join one of America’s most exuberant and tuned-in voices, poet, editor and author of thre...

It’s 30 years since the hard-boiled Inspector Rebus was given his first airing in Knots & Crosses by Ian Rankin; twenty-one installments later Rebus is still on the case, still living in Edinburgh, but is seemingly off the fags. Rankin’s work encompasses not only Tartan Noir, but short stories, a graphic novel and a play. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards, the Gr...

The Festival gala once again showcases the story-telling chops of eight writers who deliver a seven-minute true story, propless and scriptless, inspired by the theme “The Heart of the Matter”. Flexing their muscles are: Gina Cole (NZ); Glenn Colquhoun (NZ); Ivan Coyote (Canada), Anne Enright (Ireland); Lloyd Geering (NZ); James Shapiro (USA); Ian Rankin (Scotland); and Mpho Tutu van Furth (South A...