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 ›

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 ›

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 ›

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 ›

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 ›

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 ›

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 ›

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 ›

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 ›

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 ›