Auckland Writers Festival organisers thrilled with 2014 line-up

  • Breaking
  • 18/03/2014

Organisers of the Auckland Writers Festival are excited to have two of the biggest names in New Zealand literature on the programme this year.

The festival, which runs May 14 - 18, will host Man Booker Prize-winning Kiwis Eleanor Catton and Keri Hulme, as well as Pulitzer Prize-winner Alice Walker (The Color Purple) and Irvine Welsh of Trainspotting fame.

TV3's own John Campbell will host a session on the Saturday with Catton, who shot to international fame last year with her second novel, The Luminaries.

"As a festival director you strive to get those prize-winners on to your stage," says festival director Anne O'Brien.

"She's a brilliant writer, she's a wonderful woman, just a pleasure. We've had her on the programme before, and to be able to celebrate that with her here is great."

Hulme, whose only novel The Bone People won the Man Booker Prize in 1985, lives on the West Coast and avoids the limelight - but Ms O'Brien says she had no trouble getting the reclusive writer onboard.

"We wanted to find one New Zealand book and create a giant book club session at the festival where everyone could read the book and come and talk about it: do they like it? Don't they like it? Why, why not?

"And when we picked The Bone People, we thought it was a groundbreaking, international prize-winning work, I rang her up and she was really chuffed, actually. I invited her to come and just read at the beginning of the session to just set the tone and give us some of that wonderful writing, and she was delighted."

Hulme's appearance at the festival was instrumental in getting Walker on the schedule.

"She's very keen to come to New Zealand, she's very interested in meeting with indigenous women here," says Ms O'Brien.

"We're celebrating Patricia Grace this year, we've got Keri Hulme coming up from Okarito to celebrate The Bone People with us, so we'll have a wonderful raft of indigenous women - and that's one of the things that pushes Alice's buttons."

More than 34,000 tickets were sold to events at last year's festival.

Tickets for this year's festival go on sale tomorrow.

3 News

source: newshub archive