Auckland Writers Festival

Delightfully inventive and witty, Daniel Lavery (as Mallory Ortberg) was the cofounder of The Toast, the pop-culture platform with literary depth that described its target audience as ‘librarians’. The best-selling...

In the opening paragraphs of Stella Prize shortlisted Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, author Louisa Lim is torn between journalistic neutrality and her love of Hong Kong as she is invited by...

With open source AI chatbots capable of generating text that appears increasingly human, will they eventually replace writers altogether? Some claim that AI will never have enough creativity, empathy or originality –...

Two-Spirit is a pan-Indigenous expression (FNMI – First Nations, Metis and Inuit) from Turtle Island (North America) reflecting complex understandings of gender roles, spirituality and a long history of diversity...

In Another Day in the Colony, Mununjali and South Sea Islander health activist Chelsea Watego has a chapter called F**k Hope. She urges her mob to be nihilistic because hope is the dream deferred, better to embrace...

How do fiction writers deal with Covid? Full-on or sideways? Stephanie Johnson embraces it with gusto in her new satirical novel Kind, a thriller set in lockdown, with devious plots, social blunders and superyachts...

In his book No Excuses Dave ‘the Brown Buttabean’ Letele shares how he overcame poverty, depression and crime to become an award-winning community leader inspiring people to turn their lives around. Willy De Wit was a...

When I hear my father dead I flew 10 hours into the sun next morning I put black on The 2023 TS Eliot Prize award-winning Sonnets for Albert by Anthony Joseph was cited by the judges as ‘a luminous collection which...

‘Whatever its subject, when a novel is powerful enough, it transports us readers deep into worlds not our own. That’s true of Moby Dick, and it’s certainly true of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which renders the...

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Colson Whitehead is the only writer to win for consecutive books. His best-selling novels 'The Underground Railroad' and 'The Nickel Boys' addressed racial injustice...

The word ‘Powwow’ is often used to refer to a quick impromptu meeting, but in Northern Plains Indigenous cultures, there is nothing quick or casual about their traditional gathering and ceremony. Rejecting...

The impacts of climate change are upon us, we know that, and the recent brutal weather events have shown we can’t sit idly by. It’s time for fresh thinking and radical action. Veteran journalist Simon Wilson, the author...

Three young fluent te reo speakers producing inspirational work across a variety of genres, talk about the bravery and passion it took to take the unmapped uncharted leap into a creative life. Founding member of...

Aotearoa’s most anticipated book release of 2023 has been Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, coming ten years after she won the Booker Prize for The Luminaries. A psychological thriller set in the South Island, Shakespearean...

Is The Axeman’s Carnival the great Kiwi Gothic classic? Plenty of reviewers think so. Catherine Chidgey surprised everybody when she revealed her next book was going to be narrated by a mimicking magpie. Would it work...