The 2022 Read NZ Te Pou Muramura Panui features the eminent writer Dame Fiona Kidman talking about her life as a reader and writer.

The eminent writer Dame Fiona Kidman gives this year's annual lecture for Read NZ Te Pou Muramura.

Listen to Dame Fiona Kidman's lecture The heart of the matter

Dame Kidman's talk spans her own personal reading journey to her job as founding secretary of the then New Zealand Book Council, a career as a celebrated author, and her lifelong love of the written word.

The fluent and vivid script - evidence of Kidman's skill as a writer - begins with an account of childhood, and how she learned to read while recuperating in a Kawakawa hospital.

Later, she recounts being of interest to the NZ spy agency as she began work for the Book Council. There she helped set up the programmes like Writers in Schools which continue to make their mark on the literary landscape of this country.

To download a copy of the pānui, follow this link to the dedicated page on the Read Te Pou Muramura website.

From the lecture

I learned to read in a country hospital in the Far North. At the end of World War II, my parents had bought land in Kerikeri. My Irish father was in the air force throughout that war, although his health had prevented him from seeing active service abroad so he didn't qualify for a rehabilitation loan to buy a farm or set himself up for the future in other ways. My prudent Scots mother, herself of farming stock, saved up his pay and earned money of her own from milking on her parent's farm. There was enough for a deposit on the cheapest block of land they could find. My father bought it, sight unseen. In an early novel of mine called Mandarin Summer, the fictional me, who becomes a girl called Emily, has this to say:

It's nearly thirty-five years now since I first went north. I was with my mother and I was eleven years old. When we left the south my grandmother and my aunts and uncles all came to the railway station and wept over me, as if I was going to a far country. My grandmother wore black, presumably to suit the occasion. My mother wore her best clothes with a cherry-red pudding bowl hat over her short-cropped greying hair as if to say, well, it's going to be all right, it's going to be fun up there amongst the orchards and hibiscus, the pukka sahibs and tea on the lawn.

Except for the fact that I was still shy of six, that is how it was, just as the fictional narrator describes the scene. It was hard for most of the years the real-life family was up north…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details