For children and the childlike. Britain’s 2014 Number One bestselling children’s author David Walliams brings his zany children’s tales to the Festival stage in his only Auckland appearance. With seven books, including The Boy In The Dress, Mr Stink, Gangsta Granny and Awful Auntie, Walliams has captured the imaginations of readers around the world. Don’t... Read full post ›

Auckland Writers Festival » Podcasts

David Walliams: Awful Auntie

UK author David Mitchell returns to the Festival following the publication of his Booker-longlisted The Bone Clocks. In this and other novels such as Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green he playfully uses realism, fantasy, time-shifts and interlocking stories to create some of the most engaging fiction around. Mitchell updates us on his writerly sojourns in conversation with Catherine Robertson.... Read full post ›

David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks

The Scottish Manhattan-based actor Alan Cumming is a busy man. He has built a fine career with roles ranging from Taggart and The Good Wife on TV, to the X-Men films, and Cabaret and Macbeth on the stage. He has had a photo exhibition named “Alan Cumming Snaps!” and developed an award-winning fragrance named “Cumming”; and has been a tireless champion for LGBT civil rights... Read full post ›

An Evening with Alan Cumming

Famed Chinese writer Xinran, author of The Good Women of China, introduces her latest book Buy Me The Sky, an investigation of the impact of China’s one-child policy on those born after 1970. With journalistic nous and novelistic flair, she scrutinises how generations of “one and onlies”, burdened with expectation but reared with scant sense of responsibility, embody... Read full post ›

Xinran: Buy Me the Sky

Daniel Mendelsohn and Anna Jackson share an enthusiam for the classics and for translation. He’s an acclaimed US memoirist, critic and translator of the Greek poet CP Cavafy; she’s a New Zealand poet whose latest collection I Clodia and Other Portraits is indebted to the scandalous Roman aristocrat Clodia, the beautiful addressee of searing and racy poetry by... Read full post ›

Translation Gymnastics: Daniel Mendelsohn & Anna Jackson

Graeme Lay and Thom Conroy have written about two figures in New Zealand’s colonial past: Captain James Cook, the inspiration for Lay’s recently completed fictional trilogy; and Ernst Dieffenbach, the free-spirited German appointed as surgeon and naturalist on the New Zealand Company’s ship “Tory”, who is at the heart of Conroy’s novel The Naturalist.The two writers... Read full post ›

Leading Men (Graeme Lay, Thom Conroy)

For some of us the Switzerland of the South Seas is not much more than a fleeting stopover for shopping, maybe even a cocktail at Raffles. But, for Edwin Thumboo, Singapore has been home for more than eighty years, and the place where he has forged a career as a writer, academic and the country’s... Read full post ›

Edwin Thumboo: Singapore a Writer’s Perspective

Poet and violinist Anna Smaill’s acclaimed debut novel The Chimes constructs a world ruled by a large musical instrument, and navigated via a musical language. It’s also a place where people are incapable of retaining memories. Bernard Beckett’s Lullaby envisages a world where memories, like body organs, can be transplanted. Futuristic, philosophical and written in inventive prose, both novels... Read full post ›

Memory Loss (Anna Smaill, Bernard Beckett)

Playwright, novelist, poet, memoirist and blogger Renée has documented New Zealand’s social history in the latter part of the twentieth century in acclaimed work including Wednesday To Come and Setting The Table. Of Scots and Ngati Kahungunu descent, Renée blogs weekly, and publishes her new novel – a trilogy – chapter by chapter online. She talks with Stephanie... Read full post ›

Renee: A Writing Life

Critics occupy an uncomfortable position, often finding themselves in the firing line from all sides: too harsh, too fawning, not constructive enough. But just what is the job of a critic? What value do they add? And what makes a good or a bad critic? International Shakespeare critic Peter Holland and New Zealand art critic... Read full post ›

The Role of the Critic

One of the world’s leading investigative journalists, Nick Davies broke the phone hacking story in the UK, worked with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange to publish classified material in the Guardian and has recently authored the bestselling Hack Attack. He joins New Zealand Herald columnist Toby Manhire to discuss media ethics, journalistic malpractice and more besides. Supported by Platinum Patrons Rosie &... Read full post ›

Nick Davies: Hack Attack

C.K. Stead is one of New Zealand’s foremost literary figures. A distinguished novelist, literary critic, poet, essayist and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland, Stead has won many awards and fellowships. He became a Member of the Order of New Zealand in 2007, and is one of only two living writers to... Read full post ›

C.K. Stead: 2015 Honoured NZ Writer

An irreverent and stinging session should be forthcoming as Steve Braunias, author of Mad Men, and David Slack, Metro contributor, gather with writer and editor Stephen Stratford to discuss satirical writing.

Satirists at Large

English comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes would rather we not see “Ancient Rome as a toga party to which our invitation went astray.” An Ancient Guide to the Modern Life is her manifesto for the relevance of classics to the 21st century. In a similar vein her novel,The Amber Fury, brings teenage and Greek angst together in... Read full post ›

Natalie Haynes: A Guide for Modern Living

Former Wallaby lock, newspaper columnist, broadcaster and author Peter FitzSimons joins us from Sydney to talk about his latest bookGallipoli, alongside other work including his biographies of the Second World War Two spook Nancy Wake and the authority-averse Ned Kelly. He will also expound on his “little theories of life”. The frisky FitzSimons is joined... Read full post ›

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Auckland Writers Festival » Podcasts

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