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AUCKLAND WRITERS FESTIVAL

11 - 16 MAY 2021

OUR 2021 PROGRAMME IS LIVE!

For six glorious days from 11 to 16 May, we will present over 200 writers with events that include conversation, reading, debate, and performance, as well as schools', family and free events, ranging fiction, non-fiction, poetry, music, theatre, culture, art and more.

This year's Auckland Writers Festival, as ever, proudly celebrates New Zealand writing and writers - it is about us, here and now. We are delighted to also welcome over 20 international guests and a major theatre work direct from the UK.  

While we’ve had to take a slightly different approach this year (for obvious reasons), we’ve curated a programme which is as full as ever and have built on our kaupapa of live engagement, with a handful of bespoke digital sessions featuring international writers-of-note and major award-winners to be delivered direct into venue for our
live Festival audience.
 

Two marquee events will stream live to the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre screen:

  • Nobel Laureate and former Booker Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Artist, activist, architect, curator and filmmaker Ai Weiwei

Continuing the success of the Festival’s 2020 COVID-pivot - our beloved Winter Series returns as our Autumn Salon Series - there will be three morning sessions, each comprising two internationals and one New Zealander based overseas, broadcast live into the Aotea Centre and facilitated by consummate host Paula Morris. These include:

  • Novelist, feminist and philanthropist Isabel Allende
  • Actor and memoirist Gabriel Byrne
  • Novelist and short story writer Yiyun Li
  • Renowned novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson
  • 2020 Costa Novel Award Winner Monique Roffey
  • 2021 Booker Winner Douglas Stuart
  • Award-winning writer and host of the On Writing podcast JP Pomare
  • Award-winning filmmaker, screenwriter, poet and script consultant Miro Bilbrough
  • Mohamed Hassan, National Slam Champion and Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry shortlister

We also welcome a line-up of international writers in-person:

  • Multi-award winning writer for readers of all ages Neil Gaiman
  • Rare book dealer and author Rick Gekoski
  • Australia’s Victorian Prize for Literature 2021 recipient Laura Jean McKay
  • Forensic pathologist and columnist Judy Melinek with her husband and co-author of her New York Times bestseller Working Stiff TJ Mitchell
  • Performer Amanda Palmer
  • Award-winning Australian novelist and former park ranger Carrie Tiffany
  • Founder and radical executive officer of The Body is Not An Apology, Sonya Renee Taylor

Our New Zealand line-up traverses topic, genre and age, as ever, with over 200 local literary legends including:

  • 2021 Honoured Writer Brian Turner
  • 2018 Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize and 2021 Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington IIML/CNZ Writer in Residence, Pip Adam
  • Former member of the Pacific Panthers and lecturer in Pacific Studies at The University of Auckland, Melani Anae
  • Emeritus Professor, writer, researcher and specialist on cultural heritage and contemporary practice, Ngahuia te Awekotuku
  • Award-winning poet and Ockham shortlister, Airini Beautrais
  • 21-year-old South Auckland based Iraqi poet and musician, Raneem Caco
  • Wright Family Foundation Esther Glen Award for Junior Fiction 2020 Winner, Weng Wai Chan
  • Current NZ Poet Laureate David Eggleton
  • Editor of the Dominion Post, former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post, and author of The Great Successor: The Secret Rise and Rule of Kim Jong Un, Anna Fifield
  • Multi-award winning novelist, short story writer, children’s author, recipient of an Arts Foundation Icon Award and a Prime Minister’s Literary Award, Patricia Grace DCNZM, QSO 

And there is so much more. Please visit www.writersfestival.co.nz for the full line-up, or here for the eBook version of our 2021 programme.

Tickets are on sale this Friday, 12 March at 9:00AM via Ticketmaster.

Tickets on sale 9:00AM Friday 12 March
View the eBook Programme

BRILLIANT THEATRE

Auckland Writers Festival and Auckland Live are proud to present the exclusive New Zealand premiere of the critically acclaimed Donmar Warehouse Production of Blindness - a powerful and gripping audio-immersive experience exploring our humanity through the metaphor of a blindness-causing pandemic. 
Based on the novel of the same name by Nobel Laureate José Saramago, adapted by award-winning playwright Simon Stephens (working from Giovanni Pontiero’s translation), and voiced by actor Juliet Stevenson, Blindness is experienced through headphones with dramatic aural and visual theatrical events in a socially-distanced auditorium.
The Auckland Writers Festival season of Blindness has been made possible by generous support of AWF donors British Council New Zealand, Philip Carter, Gardner Family, Josephine & Ross Green, Lizanne & Julian Knights, Charlotte Lockhart & Andrew Barnes, Sir Chris & Lady Dayle Mace, Fran & Geoff Ricketts, Jenny & Andrew Smith and Mark Todd. 

Hāpai Production’s beautiful and powerful Witi’s Wāhine, based on unforgettable wāhine Māori characters from Witi Ihimaera stories, will have its Auckland debut after two hugely successful seasons in its East Coast home, at Te Tairāwhiti Arts Festival. The Auckland Writers Festival season is a tribute to the play’s beloved and deeply respected writer, Nancy Brunning, who passed shortly after the Gisborne premiere in 2019.
The season is supported by Theresa Gattung.

AI WEI WEI

A cultural figure of international renown, Ai Weiwei is an artist, activist, architect, curator and filmmaker who has said that “to be deprived of a voice is to be told you are not a participant in society; ultimately it is a denial of humanity”. His art installations include Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern where he scattered 100 million porcelain “seeds” hand painted by 1,600 Chinese artisans as a commentary on mass consumption and loss of individuality; and the infamous Coca Cola Vase, a Han Dynasty urn emblazoned with the ubiquitous soft-drink logo. He served as artistic consultant on the design of the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for Beijing’s 2008 Olympics and has curated famed exhibitions around the globe. Detained by the Chinese government in 2011 and subsequently released to house arrest, he currently bases himself in Berlin. Weiwei’s new book Conversations records candid conversations with critical thinkers, including Andrew Solomon and Evan Osnos, in which he discusses his relationship with China, the meaning of citizenship, how to make art, and technology as a tool for freedom of oppression. He joins Chelsea Winstanley via livestream to discuss life, art and politics.
Supported by NZ Contemporary Art Trust.

KAZUO ISHIGURO

Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s prize citation describes him as a writer “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”. Lauded for his daring stylistic leaps – with inventive work ranging across genres including science fiction and dystopian fantasy - he has earned a myriad of honours including the Nobel and Booker Prize. Often about things left unsaid, his writing is marked by keen observation and impeccable restraint and includes acclaimed novels The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both of which have been made into highly regarded films. Now comes his new book, Klara and the Sun, about an artificial being longing to find a human owner and described as “a novel about the human heart that speaks urgently to the here and now, but from another place”. Michelle Langstone leads a livestream conversation with this exceptional writer on his life’s work.
Supported by Asia New Zealand Foundation.

ONLINE, IN VENUE

Novelist, feminist and philanthropist Isabel Allende’s first novel The House of the Spirits was published in 1982. She has since authored more than 23 books, and sold more than 75 million copies, the latest of which is The Soul of a Woman, a meditation on power and feminism.
Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prizewinning novel Shuggie Bain has garnered multiple international award nominations. The Glaswegian studied at the Royal College of Art and his stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker and on Lit Hub.

IN-PERSON, IN VENUE

THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND
FESTIVAL FORUM

‘Cancel Culture’ could be one of the most polarising social movements of our time: for some an overdue way of speaking truth to power, for others evidence of a mob mentality in a moralistic new world. It’s a minefield of legal and commercial concerns, freedom of speech issues, and moral challenges. In a free-ranging discussion, journalist David Cohen who has written about the subject extensively for journals including The Spectator, transgender author Caitlin Spice who has a large social media following, and author, poet, speaker and activist Sonya Renee Taylor, take up the debate with Catriona Ferguson.
Supported by The University of Auckland.

AUCKLAND SPEAKS II

What if Queen Street wrote a love letter to Karangahape Road? What would Bastion Point have to say to Ihumātao? What if Rangitoto challenged the SkyTower to a rap battle?
In this series of love letters to Tāmaki Makaurau, local poets, storytellers and rappers share original works of art from the voice of their home. Join Aigagalefili Fepulea’i Tapua’i, Dominic Hoey, Nga - Hinepu - ko-rero, Daisy Speaks, Takunda Muzondiwa, Raneem Caco and Eric Soakai for a hilarious, powerful and enlightening evening where the spaces that we call home speak back.
Supported by Embassy of the United States of America

RICK GEKOSKI

Booker Prize judge, writer, broadcaster, rare book dealer and all-round polymath Rick Gekoski, whom Tatler once described as “think Bill Bryson, only on books”, has in recent years turned his versatile hand to fiction. First up was novel Darke (published when he was 72) about how we choose to live, and how we choose to die, filtered through recluse James Darke. Sebastian Barry labelled it a “wondrous book with two fathers, Kingsley Amis and Dante” and Colm Toibin declared Gekoski to be a supreme example of a natural and gifted storyteller. Follow-up Darke Matter has been described by The Times as “even more stylish, funny and daring ...it enthusiastically embraces so many subjects, from the nothingness-but-everythingness of words to how foie gras should never come out of a tin”. Gekoski discusses his late incarnation as a novelist with Catriona Ferguson. 

MONIQUE FISO

In 2019, Time magazine named Monique Fiso’s (Ngā Rauru, Ngāti Ruanui) Wellington restaurant Hiakai as one of the ‘100 Greatest Places’ in the world – a long way from an after-school job in Porirua as a sandwich hand. Fiso’s incomparable talent has led to work in Michelin-star restaurants, featuring on Netflix’s The Final Table, and receiving praise from publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, National Geographic and Forbes. A visionary modern-day food warrior, taking Māori cuisine to the world, Fiso has now produced the stunning Ockham NZ Book Awards shortlisted book Hiakai. This story of kai Māori charts her personal journey, ranging across history, tradition and tikanga, and serves up foraging and usage notes, an illustrated ingredient directory, and over 30 recipes. In a session to savour she speaks with Kim Knight. 
Supported by Platinum Patrons Pip Muir & Kit Toogood.

TAKE A WALK

TAKE A WALK - AUCKLAND ARCHITECTURE: Architecture writer John Walsh and photographer Patrick Reynolds lead an exclusive tour of some of Auckland’s best buildings – from the Victorian era to the brand new – to celebrate the updated edition of their sparkling bestseller Auckland Architecture: A Walking Guide.
Supported by Heart of the City

ON SONGWRITING: REB, TOM, MARLON & MOANA

The late acclaimed songwriter Leonard Cohen once said, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. Being a songwriter is like being a nun. You’re married to a mystery.” In an effort to interrogate the proposition, an incredible line-up of New Zealand songwriters – Reb Fountain, Tom Scott and Marlon Williams – join fellow artist Moana Maniapoto for a discussion about their artistry, their inspirations, the good days and the bad, with acoustic performances to round out the conversation.

FROM GALA STARS TO HONOURED WRITERS

The Festival’s public days will open in the customary, spectacular way, with the hugely popular Festival Gala. This year eight terrific writers will take the stage to tell a true, no-script-no-prop personal story using ‘Stranger Than Fiction’ as their prompt. They include poet and comms queen Kate Camp, Garance Doré, Poet Laureate David Eggleton, Iranian-NZ filmmaker and essayist Ghazaleh Golbakhsh, literary legend Witi Ihimaera, award-winning Australian writer Laura Jean McKay, comedian and author Tom Sainsbury, and poet Aigagalefili Fepulea’i Tapua’i, who also appears in the spoken word showcase Auckland Speaks II with a stellar line-up including Ngā Hinepūkōrero.

The Festival will close triumphantly, with a special free event featuring esteemed taonga and AWF Honoured Writers: Fiona Kidman, Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, Vincent O’Sullivan, CK Stead, Brian Turner and Albert Wendt – uniting on stage with Michele A’Court. 

WORKSHOP SERIES

The Festival’s workshop series is always popular among literary followers, fellow writers and emerging wordsmiths. This year they include a series of live and livestream sessions in the Aotea Centre with Kevin Barry (Short Fiction), Mary Karr (The Art of Memoir. Pictured), Yiyun Li (Storytelling Geometry), Andrew O’Hagan (Unpicking the Essay), Marilynne Robinson (Elements of Craft), Michael Robotham (Compelling Characters in crime writing), Shaun Tan (Picture Book Practice), alongside in-person workshops with Sue Copsey (Self-Editing), David Eggleton (The Bare Essentials in poetry), Rebecca Macfie (True Stories), Eileen Merriman (Crafting YA), Paul Kalburgi (The Writer’s Toolkit), Carl Nixon (Destroying the (Perceived) Constraints of Theatre), and Carrie Tiffany (Collage for Writers).

WITH THANKS TO OUR MAJOR FESTIVAL PARTNERS:



                        
                
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