Backstage, The Gala Night, photo courtesy of AWF

The Auckland Writers Festival Waituhi o Tāmaki (14 – 19 May) drew record breaking crowds, with more than 85,000 attendees, 25 sellout events, and 167 events featuring 240 participants from across Aotearoa and overseas. The festival included multiple genres, ranging subject matter and captivating voices. Over 25% of the programme was completely free and unticketed. Over 6000 school students were inspired by authors in the days leading up to festival, and Level 5 of the Aotea Centre became Pukapuka Adventures at the weekend, with story, song, dance, art and play events for young book lovers. The pop-up bookstalls, run by The Women’s Bookshop, reported their biggest year for book sales in the Festival’s history. 

The new Festival team included Artistic Director Lyndsey Fineran, who joined the team in August 2023 after a successful tenure at the UK’s Cheltenham Literature Festival. Catriona Ferguson came on board as Managing Director in January 2024. Plus there were three guest curators: Michael and Matariki Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue) whose innovative programming celebrated storytelling in all its forms, and Professor Damon Salesa who brought a strong Pacific-focus to his line-up.

I live streamed the book awards. It was a terrific occasion that honoured sixteen books shortlisted in the four categories, and the three best first books. This year included Te Mūrau o te Tuhi, a special award given for a book written originally and entirely in te reo Māori. Watch online here.

From afar, it felt like the festival was buzzing with ideas, stories, connections. I love how festivals reconnect you with books you have read and loved, and introduce those unfamiliar to you. I invented a pop-up festival at home, reading and loving Rachael King’s novel Gremlings, listening to Sinéad Gleeson’s wonderful Hagstone, catching a few interviews with participants that had aired on Radio NZ National (see links below), ordering some books online. Madeleine Slavick had posted a photo of the poetry table at Unity Books in Wellington and I snapped up a few collections I had not heard of. (Ah! Do send me photos of poetry book tables in your favourite bookshops!) A highlight? I was blown away by Abraham Verghese in conversation with Kathryn Ryan, as he spoke of the joys of medicine and writing, such empathy and wisdom. So resonant for me. Would loved to have gone to his session, crossing fingers it appears in podcast form.

What I was loving in the festival snippets I read on social media was how writing, whatever the genre, was bound by neither rules nor pigeon holes, but was an open ticket to self and world travel, to storytelling with vibrant threads to past, present and future, to building multiple melodies and rhythms, reading tracks and side roads, to challenging dogma and ignorance, to forging sustaining relationships with the books we produce.

I mention this because I am heartened by the way the Auckland Writers Festival celebrates and connects multiple writing communities. We are still drawing hidden voices from the shadows, but I am absorbing such a satisfying richness of books, poetry, storytelling, documentation, essay writing, children’s writing. And I am all the better for it.

Abraham Verghese, photo courtesy of AWF

Some RNZ National links

Best-selling author and Stanford University medical school professor Abraham Verghese in conversation with Kathryn Ryan RNZ National on the joys of medicine and writing

Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with Susie Ferguson RNZ National

Leslie Jamison in conversation with Kathryn Ryan RNZ National

Kiran Dass, Jenna Wee, Michael Bennet and Matariki Bennett discuss Best of the Fest on RNZ National’s Culture 101.

Poetry Shelf invited a number of readers and writers to share a takeaway highlight, a special event, quotations they jotted in their notebook. Thank you all, especially in post festival tiredness, to contribute to this collage. Thank you.

A festival collage

Kiri Piahana-Wong

I enjoyed the session ‘Still Wanted: A Room of One’s Own’ with Anna Funder, Leslie Jamison and Selina Tusitala Marsh interviewed by Paula Morris. Leslie said that being a mother artist has challenged the notion that art has to be produced in pure spheres of time, rather she now has a messier more ragged idea of where art comes from. She believes her art/writing is more complex, layered and interesting as a result. She said: ‘Don’t be afraid to embrace scattered hectic time as full of the richness of the layers of living. Your life is not ‘on pause’ when you are engaged in all those domestic tasks.’

Leslie was asked if she uses affirmations. She said no, but said she might start using Selina’s poetry as her morning affirmations in the future And she expressed a wish that Selina speak to her students.

I found Viet Thanh Nguyen’s session profoundly moving and I cried a few times. He said a reviewer said his work was giving ‘a voice to the voiceless’ or that he should ‘be the voice for the voiceless’. He challenged that, saying that people are not voiceless, rather when this word is used it means ‘the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard’. He said that what is most important is abolishing the conditions of voicelessness.

Carole Beu, The Women’s Bookshop

What a buzz! I was inspired, exhausted and utterly invigorated by the festival. I attended a total of 19 brilliant sessions while my gallant staff ran the festival bookstall (We employed a total of 40 booksellers over the week!)

I was thrilled by Bonnie Garmus, Anna Funder, Celeste Ng, Anne Salmond, Lauren Groff, and finally Ann Patchett in a witty, spontaneous, enthralling conversation with Meg Mason that was a stunning closing event.

I also encountered some truly lovely men. Trent Dalton made 2200 people weep as well as roar with laughter. Richard Flanagan, Abraham Verghese, Paul Lynch, and Viet Thanh Nguyen  were intelligent, sensitive and aware.

The whole event was sensational. The best line – ‘Fiction is the lie that tells the truth’.

photo courtesy of AWF

Nat Baker

“All books are political, and if they say they’re not then they’re political in the worst way”, from Lauren Groff at her awesome session on Friday. I’ve been too sick to attend more than two sessions, but this one was wonderful.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, photo courtesy of AWF

Susanna Andrews

Viet Thanh Nguyen at Thursday’s Gala night: ‘being a refugee has given me the requisite trauma to become a writer’.

Carl Shuker

Leslie Jamison with always excellent chair Noelle McCarthy on how you can fold the chaos of life RIGHT NOW – whether it’s kids or whatever your particular chaos – into your art practice and it can enrich and deepen the work. Nietzschean radical acceptance rather than living in frustration and a sense of distraction.

Noelle McCarthy

‘I know a man who knew a man who knew a locksmith,’ a line by Janet Frame, referring to the doctor who is a dedicatee of many of her books, who opened up her writing life.

Read aloud by Peter Simpson, from the beautiful session on Janet Frame with Meg Mason and Pamela Gordon.

Chair Kiran Dass with Noelle McCarthy and Sinéad Gleeson (Ireland) for the session ‘Ireland: Small Island, Literary Powerhouse’. Photo courtesy of AWF

Kiran Dass

Wow, what an absolutely sensational festival the 2024 Auckland Writers Festival was. A glorious and happy dream of minds and hearts coming together. Everywhere I looked I just saw smiling faces. I loved being in conversation on stage with such talented, thoughtful and smart writers, and loved the many off stage chats with old friends and new. The writing community really is the greatest. I feel so energised, brain-fed, heart-filled, and fired up. Congratulations to Lyndsey Fineran, Catriona Ferguson and their amazing team for delivering a remarkable festival. I’m so grateful to have been included. Putting on a festival is a huge amount of work! So much thinking, care, and mindmelting logistics go into putting on the seemingly effortless magical sessions audiences see take place on the stage.

Lynn Davidson

A special AWF highlight for me (among many highlights) was the fire and energy and humour in the room during the ‘If Not Now, When: Midlife Realisations and Rebellions’, event. Sharing the stage with Emily Perkins and Claire Mabey as we talked midlife shifts and the possibilities they can open up felt like being part of a necessary and welcome conversation. 

Pip Adam

The highlight of my week was Emma Wehipeihana’s acceptance speech for best first book. She spoke directly about working in a stretched health system, I was so glad the Prime Minister was there to hear this. And this quote made me cry: “As a doctor, I’ve seen the inside of most orifices of the human body and held the viscera of the living and the dead and I can tell you without a doubt that it’s the arts and artists who elevate our existence from being sacks of meat circling a dying star to something magical …”

Claire Mabey

I loved what Jane Campion said about writing which was ‘writing is being in a relationship with the subconscious’. And I also really loved the banned books session — some books can be dangerous and troubling but those books help us think — we can’t eliminate ideas that trouble us, we just have to think against them and talk about them

Amber Esau

In The Science Behind Science Fiction session Dr. Octavia Cade asked ‘Are we still going to be the same kind of human without them’ on leaving behind kākāpō, kauri trees, and the environment we already have a relationship with in pursuit of a new planet. This echoed back to me when Sascha Stromach, in the We Can Be On Other Planets: Māori Speculative Fiction session, said, “So much sci-fi is inherently colonial… a Māori approach would be learning to be a kaitiaki of another planet.” There was something sparked for me from these kōrero about the implications of ownership, our responsibilities to who and what gets left behind, and our ethical considerations for exploring new worlds in fiction. 

Catherine Chidgey

I’ve loved being in amongst the buzz of this bumper festival…and I was delighted to have a very dedicated 12-year-old taking part in my workshop on writing child narrators.

Harriet Allan

I hadn’t consciously planned it this way, but I went to a string of events by lively, intelligent, talented women, starting with Rebecca Vaughan performing Virgina Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (it was terrific to be reminded of this work). Other books I had loved and were featured included Anna Funder’s Wifedom and Sarah Ogilvie’s Dictionary People, and neither author disappointed in person. Anne Salmond, Roimata Smail and Katy Hessel all shone, and there were several stimulating line-ups, including three lots of three women, two of which featured authors I have worked with – Patricia Grace and Lauren Keenan – so of course I am biased in loving hearing them. There were a few other (also enjoyable) sessions I attended, and many more I wished I could have seen if money, time and brain-fatigue hadn’t had to be allowed for, but I came away thinking Virginia Woolf might well have felt pleased with the plethora of excellent books now being written by women.

Rachael King

photo courtesy of AWF

The schools days were incredible! So many hungry young minds, eager to meet writers. This photo says it all.

A school session, photo courtesy of AWF

Eileen Merriman

Sadly I didn’t have long at AWF this year but purchased these three beauties on my way to chair a Crime Writers Panel featuring the fantastic Michael Bennett, Paul Cleave and Gavin Strawhan. The book on the bottom helped soothe the nerves beforehand!

Mary McCallum

Jenna Todd, Sinéad Gleeson, Becky Manawatu

Auckland and the Auckland Writers Festival were in the pink yesterday on my first full day at this huge, exciting and at times overwhelming event — Becky Manawatu, Irish writer Sinéad Gleeson and bookseller Jenna Todd matched up with Sinéad’s glorious book to talk about it and Becky’s Auē and upcoming Kataraina (and oh so much about speaking Irish and Māori, living on islands and women finding their best selves, beautifully steered by Jenna). The sky tower pinked in sympathy and so did one of the thousands of people filling the Aotea Centre looking for a literary fix.

Anna Funder was a joy talking with Susie Ferguson about her extraordinary book Wifedom, which tells the life of the “invisible” woman who was the wife of George Orwell and brilliantly dissects the patriarchy as it goes. No pink on her! The book, though, is a pink-adjacent bright orange.

Becky talked about seeing Ana Scotney’s  play ‘Scattergun’ in her Gala Night speech:

“Ana Scotney’s Scattergun was not one woman. She was a room of women, a 
room of people. But I did not know that yet.I was not prepared for how expansive, detailed, how wild, forested, rivered and wholly alive, Scattergun’s world would be. Gorgeous defibrillate your heart, bring-you-back-to-life art. Art. What a wasteland this world would be without it.”

The Gala Night, photo courtesy of AWF

Melinda Szymanik

On my way to my Saturday session with Elizabeth Acevedo, Saraid de Silva and Tsitsi Mapepa – ‘Writing across Generations’ – I spotted Gareth and Louise Ward and stopped to say hi because this is one of the best things about the Festival – connecting with other passionate book folk. Louise proceeded to demonstrate her bookselling skills and I went straight off to buy Acevedo’s new book Family Lore. The session was wonderful, all three writers sharing generously on family and their fab books. Later I met up with fellow writer Jane Bloomfield for a good natter and then I was off to the Illustration Duel between Toby Morris and Giselle Clarkson. This theoretically was for the younger set but the adults in the audience were enjoying it just as much as the children. So much talent, so much networking, so much fun.

Toby Morris, and below with Giselle Clarkson

Gala Night signing table. Photo courtesy of AWF

photo courtesy of AWF