Daniel Mendelsohn is an American memoirist, essayist, critic, columnist, and translator who is presently a Contributing Editor at Travel + Leisure. He is the author of the international 2006 award-winning bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, about growing up in a family haunted by the disappearance of relatives during the Holocaust, and his most recent book is Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays From the Classics to Pop Culture (2012, New York Review Books). He will visit New Zealand for two sessions at the 2015 Auckland Writers Festival (13-17 May).

Zia Haider Rahman is a Bangladeshi-born novelist whose circuitous route to writing his first book included stints as a Wall Street banker and an international human rights lawyer. His book In the Light of What We Know is a cerebral and poetic journey in which two former friends, both of whom who are South-Asian and become friends at University, reconnect twenty years later.

English literature and music graduate whose debut novel, The Chimes, is set in a future Britain where people's memories are controlled by music.

American surgeon and writer, whose new book is Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End.

Dirty tricks - power, politics and vasts amounts of money. Britain's phone-hacking scandal has made for a compelling story. In fact, George Clooney has just announced he's making a movie about it. We'll talk to the Guardian journalist who started it all, Nick Davies. He spent eight years uncovering the full extent of not only hacking at the News of the World, but how other British institutions were caught up in the practice.

Australian author, screenwriter and journalist known for her novels and non-fiction works, the latest of which is This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial.

Military historian Christopher Pugsley talks with John McCrystal about his career, the business of writing about the First World War, and it contemporary resonances.

Military historian Christopher Pugsley talks with John McCrystal about his career, the business of writing about the First World War, and it contemporary resonances.

The eminent historian Professor Margaret MacMillan explores the origins of the First World War, and the contemporary parallels to what happened a century ago. With Kate Hunter in the chair, this session was recorded at the 2014 NZ Festival's Writers and Readers Week.

In a very wide-ranging conversation Diarmaid MacCulloch talks with Peter Biggs about religious belief in the modern world. As well as authoring a number of award-winning books- including Reformation, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004 and 'A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years' - Diarmaid MacCulloch has presented three BBC television series, is Professor of History of the Church at the University of Oxford, a Church of England deacon, a British Academy Fellow and, in 2012, was knighted for services to scholarship.