Auckland Writers Festival

A year of surprises, 2016 saw Britons vote to leave the European Union and Americans elect Donald Trump as president, leaving many dumbstruck and locked in an us-and-them tussle across politics, economics, race, gender and geographies. Join Pulitzer-Prizewinning journalist Susan Faludi (Backlash and Stiffed), Australian journalist Stan Grant (Talking To My Country), UK writer John Lanchester (Capi...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 Who doesn’t like a David and Goliath story? Striking Gold, written by Suzanne McFadden, is a social history of NZ and the Olympic games by way of the triumphal story of the extremely fit hockey-playing team who improbably won gold at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. Medal winners Selwyn Maister, Arthur Parkin and Ramesh Patel (former CEO of Hockey NZ), join Sarah Sandl...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 “When does philanthropy end and dirty self-promotion begin?” asks UK philosopher Julian Baggini in a recent newspaper article. The question comes as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defends his limited liability foundation from accusations of doing bad under the guise of doing good, and charities struggle to raise funds as the wealth gap widens. Does it matter if cash fo...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 A forensic account of Sri Lanka’s 25-year civil war told by one of India’s most talented writers, Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2015. The witty and urbane Subramanian, writer for The New Yorker, amongst other publications, brings his journalistic rigour to bear on the story of a little reporte...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 The cultural phenomenon Ai Weiwei has called Xu Zhiyuan “the most important Chinese intellectual of his generation”. Journalist, editor and co-founder of One Way Street Library, a bookshop and literary meeting place in Beijing, Zhiyuan’s book Paper Sky is a collection of his journalism written over the last seven years, and an eye-opener into the rapidly evolving soc...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 Dubbed Zimbabwe’s answer to Zadie Smith by cultural magazine The Skinny, the multi-talented and energetic Petina Gappah is a prizewinning author with three law degrees, including one from Cambridge University. In her day job, she works as an international trade lawyer in Geneva. In 2009, she won the Guardian First Book prize for her short story collection An Elegy fo...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 The transcendent, unclassifiable novel The Book of Strange New Things is award-winning Michel Faber’s eighth, and his declared last. A pastor is sent to a far-off planet. His job description? "Minister (Christian) to indigenous population". It’s a dystopian tale of love and faith that reviewers have observed is intent on making us kinder. Don’t miss this profound wri...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 The pre-eminent scholar and distinguished novelist, playwright, short story writer, poet, biographer and librettist Vincent O’Sullivan wears his considerable knowledge lightly. His writing is wry, erudite and generous, informed by a childhood spent in suburban Auckland and a deep interest in the multiplicity of humanity. A graduate of the Universities of Auckland and...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 Iraqis likened Emma Sky to the early twentieth-century British adventurer Gertrude Bell, one of the architects of modern Iraq. She is a formidable internationalist, with experience spanning the fields of development, diplomacy and defense. As a civilian and staunch opponent of the invasion of Iraq, she became political advisor to US general Ray Odierno in that countr...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 It’s no surprise that hard man Irvine Welsh likes Omar Musa’s debut novel Here Come The Dogs, finding it a work of “such swaggering exuberance that it will make most other fiction you read this year seem criminally dull”. Malaysian-Australian Musa has published two poetry collections and two solo hip hop albums besides, and describes his writing as “poetry of unease”...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 Maxine Beneba Clarke is a prize-winning Australian writer, essayist and slam-poetry champ of Afro-Caribbean descent with a newly released poetry collection Carrying The World, and an upcoming memoir The Hate Race. Tusiata Avia is a leading Pacific poet who has travelled the world with her one woman show Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, and launches her new collection Fale A...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 YA writer Michael Grant grew up in a military family and is quick off the mark – he moved in with his wife a day after meeting her, and has published three series of books, including the dystopian Gone, the multi-platform BZRK, and his new Front Lines trilogy set in World War II. He creates worlds where adults go AWOL, to be replaced by horror of all kinds. Hear this...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 In 1970 David Hare’s take on sisterhood, Slag, launched his prolific and stellar career as a playwright prepared to rigorously engage with the times. Since then his plays have included Pravda, a Fleet Street satire, Skylight, a Thatcherite critique currently on revival on Broadway, and Stuff Happens, about the Iraq War. Theatre aside, Hare has written a swag of mater...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 The American hybrid journalist-activist Gloria Steinem is one of the twentieth century’s most influential feminists. She was famously a Playboy bunny, but one who wrote a magazine article entitled “A Bunny’s Tale”, revealing the exploitative working conditions bunnies endured. She shot to prominence as a feminist leader with her 1969 article “After Black Power, Women...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 The lofty Australian Peter Garrett has strode many a stage, whether as frontsman for the band Midnight Oil, Labour Party minister, or environmental and social justice campaigner. In the past he has argued that Australia would be transformed if music were at its centre. His memoir Big Blue Sky provides the starting point for a conversation with Greenpeace executive di...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 Fresh from Washington D.C., literary critic, essayist and historical novelist Thomas Mallon gives the skinny on the capital. Sometimes compared to Gore Vidal – who he used to edit at GQ – his novels navigate 20th century USpolitics and display crisp wit as well as finely-grained historical context. Mallon’s latest Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years has received glow...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 Israeli strategic consultant Yossi Alpher’s experience as an intelligence official for Mossad, director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and special advisor to then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the 2000 Camp David Summit, makes him well placed to analyse the challenges facing Israel and the policies it currently operates. He h...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 Australian slam poet and hip hop artist Omar Musa and New Zealand hip hop legend King Kapisi come together for an acappella match-up. Each artist has 25 minutes to impress with their rhymes and beats. Expect an inventive earful. Musa’s debut novel Here Come The Dogs, a mash-up of poetry and prose, tells the story of disaffected youth in small town Australia; Kapisi i...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 New Yorker Vivian Gornick – journalist, essayist, critic and author of 11 books including a biography of the anarchist Emma Goldman – is also the queen of the personal narrative. Her reputation as such was made with the publication of her first memoir Fierce Attachment (1987), about her relationship with her overbearing mother. Her latest foray into the genre The Odd...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 THE MICHAEL KING MEMORIAL LECTURE In 1985 the late historian Michael King published Being Pakeha, a book which fathoms what it is to be a non-Maori New Zealander. Three decades on, the accomplished Chinese-NZ writer, reviewer, actor and director Helene Wong has published her memoir, Being Chinese: A New Zealander’s Story, which explores the experience of being of Chi...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 Daughter of Chilean revolutionaries, and subsequently a political activist herself, Carmen Aguirre now lives in Canada where she is an actor and playwright. She is also the author of two memoirs: Something Fierce: Memoirs of A Revolutionary Daughter, and the newly published Mexican Hooker #1, in which she writes of confronting the man who raped her, and being typecas...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 All eyes turn to America as the presidential race to be the 45th President of the United States plays out. From a distance, this vast and powerful country can sometimes seem redolent with contradictions and division – gender, race, class, security domestic and international - but what is it really like coast to coast? Cosmologist and writer Janna Levin and historical...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 The 2015 tour de force A Little Life has provoked intense conversation among readers and critics alike, winning the Kirkus Prize and being shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award. The 720-page novel charts four classmates making their way in New York, and is about “the limits of friendship, about the depths of pain and shame that a human can...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 The 1975 anti-diet book with the killer title - Fat Is A Feminist Issue - became and still is a bible for millions of women. Its author, Susie Orbach, has since continued to write about women's relationships to their bodies and to food, on public and private emotions, on friendships and love, on therapy. She has consulted for The World Bank and Britain's NHS and brin...

Auckland Writers Festival 2016 Jane Smiley arrives in NZ flush with the success of her Last Hundred Years trilogy – an investigation of American identity through the Midwestern Langdon clan, from the 1920s to the 2020s. Be prepared for a wide-ranging conversation with Paula Morris. Smiley’s back catalogue includes an essay on knitting, Why Bother?, a novel on the horse-racing business, Horse Heave...