Welcome to a list of the featured writers confirmed to the 2009 Wanganui Literary Festival. For a PDF of the Literary Festival Brochure click on front or back. On this site you can check out the Fringe Festival programme, find a listing of all the events and prices and on the News page you can read about the Poetry Luncheon with Glenn Colquhoun and Kevin Ireland, check out the Two One-Act Plays or check out the Writers in Schools programme. Go to the Home page for an overview of the festival. On this site you can also check out the programme from the 2007 Literary Festival and background on the festival director, Joan Rosier-Jones.
Profiles of Featured Writers at the 2009 Festival
Wanganui had New Zealand’s first successful winery, and although that has long since gone, the city now is home to eminent wine writer, Warren Barton. Warren has been a journalist for many years. He has been an editor and feature writer, specialising in travel, food and wine. In his session at the fringe festival he will throw some light on the poetic language of wine.
Depending on where you get your information from journalist, author and satirist, Steve Braunias was either born in Mount Maunganui in 1960 (Book Council website) or in Austria in 1964 (The Lumiere Reader). There is no argument, though, that he became a journalist after finishing school and has worked in a variety of media ever since. His weekly satirical columns have appeared in Sunday Star Times since 2006, and were previously published in the NZ Listener, where he worked as deputy editor from 1999 until 2005. He has also worked as the editor of Capital Times, feature writer at Metro, and senior writer for Sunday Star Times. He has won national awards for best columnist, best travel writer, best environmental writer, best arts writer (three times), best crime writer, best food writer and best sports writer; as well as winning writing fellowships to Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Fool’s Paradise was the first of three collections of his journalistic writing. It won him the New Zealand Society of Authors’ award for the Best First Book of Non-Fiction in the 2002 Montana Book Awards. The second, Roosters I Have Known is a collection of interviews, first featured in the Sunday Star Times during 2007, of influential New Zealanders including political figures such as John Key and Helen Clark. Fish of the Week published in 2008 was Steve’s personal selection from the previous three year’s columns. In 2006 Steve began scriptwriting for Eating Media Lunch and The Unauthorised History of New Zealand. He was part of the team who won the best television comedy for Eating Media in the 2008 television awards. How To Watch A Bird, Steve’s first full-length non-fiction book was published in 2007. It was highly-acclaimed, described by novelist Lloyd Jones as; 'A great book, original and captivating - compelling to the end.' Much of Steve’s writing is satirical and the line between truth and fiction is often blurred. In the above-mentioned Lumiere Reader interview www.lumiere.net.nz/reader/item/1293, it would seem that the journalist was being taken for a walk up the proverbial garden path, and at the same time was given a few lessons on how to be a good journalist. Steve encouraged him to ask some daring questions. ‘You can’t be frightened of people’ he said, ‘You are not in journalism to make friends.’ At the festival Steve Braunias will talk about his life as a journalist asking the daring questions.
Felicity Campbell was born in Wanganui and educated at the city’s Sacred Heart College. She graduated B Mus from Victoria University and has taught music at several New Zealand high schools. Her writing career began with her interest in Captain Jock McGregor, one of Wanganui’s earliest European settlers. In 2004 Steele Roberts published Making Waves Felicity’s biography of Jock McGregor. In this meticulously researched book Felicity brings the captain to life. Felicity Campbell’s family association with Wanganui dates from the late 1840s when Sergeant Robert Dawson Campbell and his wife Jane Taylor arrived with the 65th Regiment. The family has farmed in the district ever since — Felicity and her husband Michael Smyth at Cherry Bank. Her 2008 novel, No Epitaph recreates the events and causes leading to the Bennier tragedy of 1917. It tells of Ethel Bennier’s murder, and includes many local people caught up in her story. In 1991 Michael and Felicity took up part of the Oeta property in the Mangamahu Valley where these events unfolded. During the festival Felicity will discuss writing about a ‘cold case’ with Joan Rosier-Jones.
Alan Clay was born in 1954 in New Zealand and at the age of 23 attended a Clown School in Sweden. He has since taught and performed extensively in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. Alan lived in Sydney from 1992 to 2006, where he ran Playspace Studio, a physical theatre training centre in Newtown which gained international recognition for a uniquely irreverent Australian approach to clown. He currently lives in Wanganui where he runs a retreat centre, teaching clown in addition to regular Sydney workshops. His book on clown, Angels Can Fly, was launched at the Brisbane Writers festival and at events in libraries throughout New Zealand and Australia later that year. ‘Clown is a fascinating, diverse, complex and exciting art form,’ Alan says, which has existed around the planet for thousands of years. Like any art form it has to evolve to stay relevant to the culture nurturing it and at the same time clown turns upside-down the cultural patterns and boundaries around us. Alan Clay is also a novelist whose works have been produced in hard copy and as e-books. His books are published by Artmedia in Sydney. He is an expert in multi-media creativity and maximises the possibilities offered by the Internet which he sees as an interactive media. For the Wanganui Literary festival he will discuss the new media of the Internet and ways in which writers and readers can exploit it.
Glen Colquhoun is a doctor, poet and children's writer. His first collection of poetry, The Art of Walking Upright (1999), is ‘about belonging, discovering a place to stand, finding what it means to be Pakeha, and what it means to be human.’ The collection also contains photographs taken by the author, many of members of the Te Tii community in the Bay of Islands. Colquhoun spent a year in Te Tii, and this time provided the inspiration for the collection. The Art of Walking Upright won the Jessie Mackay NZSA Best First Book of Poetry Award in the 2000 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. An explanation of poetry to my father (2000) is Colquhoun's second collection of poetry. Colquhoun's picture book, Uncle Glenn and Me (1999), illustrated by Kevin Wildman, tells the story of a boy and his uncle, a much-admired role model who "talks with his mouth full, prays for lollies and burps after drinking coke." (KC.) Playing God was published in December 2002 and won the Poetry Category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2003. Glenn Colquhoun received the coveted 2003 Montana Readers' Choice Award for his collection of poetry, Playing God. After earlier winning the Montana poetry section, Colquhoun is the first poet to be awarded the Readers' Choice Award in a readers' vote. In October 2006, Playing God went Platinum with Booksellers New Zealand, making its way onto their Premier New Zealand Bestsellers' list. It is the only poetry collection in New Zealand to make it to Platinum, meaning more than 5,000 copies of the book have been sold. Colquhoun was the convenor of the 2004 New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. In 2004, Glenn Colquhoun received the country’s largest literary award, the Prize in Modern Letters, for $60,000. The other shortlisted authors were William Brandt, Kate Camp and Geoff Cush. Jumping Ship (2004) is one of twelve titles in the Montana Estates essay series published by Four Winds Press. The press was established by Lloyd Jones to encourage and develop the essay genre in New Zealand. In his essay, Colquhoun describes his time living in the Te Tii community in the Bay of Islands. Uncle Glenn and Me Too (Reed, 2004) is the sequel to Uncle Glenn and Me. Follow Uncle Glenn and his niece into their wonderful worlds of make-believe and reality, Glenn sometimes mixing it up, sometimes getting it all wrong! Glenn will read from his poetry at Sunday’s lunch.
Kate De Goldi writes short stories and novels and is especially renown for her writing for children. Her first collection of short stories, like you, really, written under the pseudonym, Kate Flannery, is impressive. It consists of eleven stories about the same Catholic family in Christchurch which documents the changes that occur over the scope of the novel. It reads as a satisfying family history, but with a substantial emotional impact. Landfall reviewer Anna Smith noticed that beneath the surface detail, the collection ‘insists on another kind of language sadness, anxiety, a longing for love and happiness’. The sense of identity through kinship implied in the title is the unifying concern.’ As Kate De Goldi she published Sanctuary in 1996, a young adult story of teenage perplexities and crises, described by Ronda Cooper as ‘an authentic modern fable somewhere between a cautionary tale and a "how to" guide for pouty girls.’ It won the overall Children’s Book Award in 1997. A second novel on adolescence, Love, Charlie Mike, was published 1997. In 2000 Penguin published her young adult novel, Closed, stranger which received an honour award in the 2000 New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards. Kate was named an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate in 2001, receiving a $30,000 cash grant. In 2004 Kate turned her considerable talents to writing for younger children. Clubs: A Lolly Leopold Story was widely acclaimed by critics and warmly received by both parents and children. It won the New Zealand Post Best Picture Book Award in 2005. Several other Lolly Leopard books followed. Her work has received a number of awards. As well as the New Zealand Post Awards she has won the American Express and BNZ/Katherine Mansfield short story awards and the Esther Glen Medal. Kate was the presenter for TVNZ's Bookenz programme and currently has a fortnightly children's book review slot on National Radio's Saturday programme with broadcaster Kim Hill. She tutors the Children's Writing and the Young Adult Novel Workshops at the Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University. In 2004 Kate was the recipient of a scholarship from the Susan Price Children's Collection to research and write a book about international children's literature. Kate De Goldi’s latest book is The 10PM Question which has been shortlisted for the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards. She will be coming to the Wanganui Literary Festival to talk to primary school children about her work and life as a writer. If there is room interested adults will be able to attend!
Dylan Horrocks, award-winning graphic novelist and comic artist, was appointed University of Auckland/Creative New Zealand Literary Fellow 2006. He is the author of Hicksville, an award-winning graphic novel, and many shorter works in comic form that have been published around the world. He has lectured on writing, art and the history of comics and presented papers at academic conferences around the world, and has written extensively on graphic novels, comics, art and literature for magazines and journals in New Zealand and the USA. ‘In recent decades the graphic novel has become an increasingly important literary form,’ says Dylan. ‘Many writers and artists are now choosing comics as a means to create serious fiction, autobiography and history. Comics are now widely studied in universities around the world.’ Hicksville explores geographical and cultural colonisation in New Zealand, was named one of the best five books of the year by the USA’s leading magazine on comics criticism, ‘The Comics Journal’. It won an Eisner Award (USA) in 2002 and was nominated for five further awards in USA and Europe. As well as being translated into three foreign languages, it has been included in a number of university courses in the US and Europe, including courses on ‘Comics as Literature’ at Yale University and Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT). Dylan Horrocks has contributed short stories in comics form to many anthology books and comics around the world. He has been a scriptwriter for commercial comics such as Batgirl in the USA, has drawn regular comic strips for New Zealand Listener and Investigate magazine, and has contributed cartoons and illustrations to numerous New Zealand magazines and newspapers, including New Zealand Listener, New Zealand Herald and New Zealand Political Review. His work has appeared in exhibitions in New Zealand, Europe and Canada and has taught classes on graphic novels, comics, writing and art at the University of Auckland, Auckland University of Technology, Unitec and Massey University. His later works include two new graphic novels as well as a number of shorter comics that explore the politics of superhero comics and the meaning of America since 9/11. During the festival he will talk to groups of students from secondary schools and the Graphic Arts department at UCOL, as well as the general public.
Kevin Ireland, poet, short story writer, novelist and librettist, was born Kevin Jowsey in Auckland. In his 20s he lived for a time in the army hut of his mentor Frank Sargeson, that Janet Frame once occupied. Co-founder of Mate, Ireland headed for England in 1959, remaining there for twenty-five years (with the exception of a short interval in Bulgaria, translating Bulgarian poetry into English) For two decades he was employed by The Times. Reviews of Ireland’s verse tend to mention his spare and witty style, his resolute minimalism, his regular use of imagery and extended metaphors, his carefully patterned forms and recurring themes of love. In interviews he characterises himself as a fossil; a lyricist of ‘the Glover, Fairburn, Mason tradition that he feels is now decidedly old hat’; part of a generation with an ‘anxiety about identity ‘obsessed’ with what it meant to be New Zealanders.’ Even in self-imposed exile, Ireland considered himself a New Zealand poet and published all of his work here. But distance exacted a cost, and much of the poetry written outside New Zealand attempts to anchor identity by focusing on detail; as if to recapture the people and the country through a collage of remembered impressions. His first collection of poems was published in 1967, and the following volumes were published both in England and New Zealand. Since his return to New Zealand he has published short story collections, four novels, and his memoir in two parts. His memoir, Under the Bridge and Over the Moon won the 1999 Montana Book Awards History and Biography section. His novels are often comic and satirical. He has been closely involved with the New Zealand Society of Authors (PEN) and was President in 1990-1991. Kevin Ireland received an OBE for services to literature in 1990, and in 2004 he received a $60,000 Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement for poetry. He is a wonderful raconteur and will enhance the festival tremendously in two ways – firstly speaking about his life and work, and secondly reading from his poetry at a lunch at Poppies bookstore.
Alexa Johnston spent nineteen years as a curator at Auckland Art Gallery and is now a freelance curator and writer. Her illustrated biography of Sir Edmund Hillary, An Extraordinary Life, was published in 2005. In a complete departure, Ladies, a plate is a cookery book about traditional New Zealand baking, which contains recipes selected from personal collections and community cook books, all tested in her home kitchen in Auckland. It was published in September 2008. This year the sequel will be published just two days before the Wanganui Literary Festival begins. It is called Second Helping: More from Ladies a Plate. During the festival Alexa will share the platform with chef Ray McVinnie. They will discuss their love of food and the knack of writing about it.
Fiona Kidman grew up in Northland, and began a library career in Rotorua after she left school. Books have always played a central role in her life. She learned to read one afternoon in hospital when she was six and, not being aware that there was anything else to read, read all the adult books in the hospital library over the weeks that followed. ‘This didn't make me especially clever,’ she says, ‘but it did make me aware of the powerful role of stories, and I have been telling them ever since.’ She has worked in the media as a journalist, radio producer, and as a radio, film and television script writer, but now works wholly as a writer and occasional teacher of writing. She has many short stories and novels to her name. Her writing is concerned with the effects of suburban and provincial lower middle-class life, its morals and hypocrisies. Her style is realist, often filtered through the consciousness of the main character. Many of her novels and short stories involve outsiders in a narrowly conformist society. The outsider status is often dramatised by sexual transgression and punishment. She has won a number of wards and scholarships: the Ngaio Marsh Award for television Writing (1971), the 1988 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction with the Book of Secrets, and the Literary Fund Award for Achievement. She has been awarded the Scholarship in letters a number of times. In 1988 she was the Victoria University writing fellow and was awarded the OBE, and in 1998 was made a Dame Commander of the New Zealand Order of Merit. She was the Creative New Zealand Michael King Fellow in 2008, and the New Zealand Society of Authors President of Honour 2008/2009. The Captive Wife was the Readers’ Choice in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, 2006. Her non-fiction works include Gone North (with photographer Jane Ussher, 1984), and Wellington (with Grant Sheehan, 1989. Palm Prints (1994) represents a range of her non-fiction autobiographical pieces, speeches and literary journalism. More recently her memoir, At the End of Darwin Road (2008) was published to acclaim. The second part of this will be published in 2009 and she will be attending the Wanganui Literary Festival to talk about the business of memoir writing. She will also share the platform with Lloyd Jones talking about the novel.
Hamish McDouall is a lawyer, a former Master Mind winner, a cricket writer and historian. He has watched cricket on five continents and has written for The Observer, The Listener, North and South and When Saturday Comes. He also wrote the biography of Chris Cairns, called Chris Cairns. His latest book The Great Kiwi Sports Quiz Book was published in 2008. Hamish currently lives in Wanganui where he was born and bred and he will represent the local writers at the Wanganui Literary Festival at the Sports Quiz night when he asks questions from his book.
Celebrity chef, Ray McVinnie is Cuisine magazine food editor and food columnist for the Sunday Star Times magazine. As such Ray shares his passion for food with thousands of New Zealanders. He is an experience food stylist and won the 2005 New Zealand Guild of Food Writer’s Visuals Award and the Singapore Tourism Award. Ray has also won awards for his food and travel writing and is an experienced food judge, chef and lecturer at the Auckland University of Technology. He has published four cookery books. In Eat he shows how to get maximum value and pleasure out of home cooking. Ray is very passionate about organic food and locally produced ingredients. ‘It is easy to cook good food using natural ingredients… ingredients as close to their natural state as possible as opposed to using prepared or processed food,’ he said. ‘I like showing people just how easy it is to cook this sort of delicious, healthy, satisfying food. It is about using good ingredients in simple ways, taking advantage of what’s in season or what is available in the fridge.’ Ray will talk about his food philosophy during the Wanganui Literary Festival.
Popular novelist, Nicky Pellegrino, was born in Italy and raised in Merseyside, England. She spent her summer holidays in southern Italy as a child and came to live in New Zealand after marrying a New Zealander. She was the editor of New Zealand Woman’s Weekly and currently works as a freelance journalist and author. Her first book was Angela D’Audney’s best-selling autobiography, A Wonderful Life (Penguin), which was written while the broadcaster was dying of a brain tumour and Nicky says it was the most difficult and saddest thing she’s ever done. In 2003 her first novel, Delicious, was published by Random House. It went on to be picked up by UK publishing company Orion and has since been translated into Dutch, German, Greek, Spanish and Portuguese. Her second novel, The Gypsy Tearoom, was equally successful. Nicky lives in Auckland with her husband and two large dogs, and commutes to Muriwai to ride her large chestnut horse as often as she can. She reportedly returns to Italy regularly in order to ‘eat the best mozzarella’. When asked where her ideas come from she said talked about ‘the birth of a novel’. ‘For me,’ she wrote, ‘ideas come when my mind is empty of clutter. When I’m not worrying about the boring stuff like paying bills and meeting deadlines. I might be riding up a hill with my horse on a long rein admiring the view. Or walking my dogs on the beach at 7am. Actually I’m just as likely to be shoving laundry in the washing machine or sweeping the floors. The important thing is that I’m not fully engaged in whatever it is I’m doing and my mind is free to wander.’ At the festival Nicky will talk about her writing career and her popular novels including her latest ‘The Italian Wedding.
Joan Rosier-Jones currently lives in Wanganui and was the organiser of the last two literary festivals. She has a BA in History and English from Massey University and a teacher’s training certificate. Her first novel, Cast Two Shadows was published in 1985 to acclaim. She was awarded the Arts Council Writer’s Bursary in 1987, and has since had four other novels published, as well as two how-to-write books, So You Want to Write and Writing Your Family History. Since becoming a writer she has combined the two loves of her life, teaching and writing, and takes classes and seminars throughout New Zealand and Australia in creative writing, creative non-fiction, memoir and family history. She is an active member of the New Zealand Society of Authors (PEN Inc) having been National President in the late 1990s and is currently the regional delegate for the Central Districts Branch. In 2009 her first ‘real’ non-fiction work will be published. The Murder of Chow Yat is the true story of the murder of a Chinese man in Wanganui, 1922. The murder was unsolved but Joan has unearthed important evidence which points to the culprit. As well as being the co-ordinator of the festival she will contribute by taking part in a discussion with Felicity Campbell whose novel about another Wanganui murder is her first work of fiction.
P A (Trish) Summers - playwright moved from Te Kauwhata to Wanganui in 1999 and joined the Wanganui Writer's Group in 2000. That year she entered a play in the Minolta PANZ Short Play Contest and placed second equal. In 2003 she placed second in the Wanganui Film Festival Screenwriting contest. She is a member of Playmarket. Trish works as a web editor for a small media company. Her play, Prelude in C Sharp Minor, will be performed as part of the festival in the Repertory’s presentation of two one-act plays written by Wanganui playwrights. Prelude is a dark comedy about a young woman who works in a music store and has a part-time job turning pages for a concert pianist. She aspires to become a concert pianist herself. The play traces the humorous and tragic events in her life culminating in a chance to perform on the big stage herself.
Robert Tripe is a playwright and actor. After studying French and Japanese at Victoria University, Robert went on to Toi Whakaari: NZ Drama School as an actor, graduating in 1999. As well as working in theatre, he has also taught English in both Japan and Tahiti, and worked in a hotel in France before appearing in a play there in 2004. Since then he has performed extensively in theatres around New Zealand. Nominated as Supporting Actor of the Year for the last two years at the Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards, some of Robert’s more memorable roles recently have been in The Cherry Orchard, The Graduate, Death of a Salesman, Troy – The Musical, and Yours Truly. Robert Tripe’s contribution to the festival is a play, The Venetian Bride, which he adapted from a short story by Maurice Shadbolt. The play is one of two one-act plays being produced by the Repertory Theatre for the festival. It is a love triangle in which a young, unsophisticated New Zealand girl meets a hot-blooded Italian man. Set partly in 1930’s New Zealand the play is about Rose Lightfoot, artist and spinster, who breaks free from her overbearing father and sheltered life to seek artistic fulfillment in Europe. In a café in Venice she finds love, but at what cost? Rose’s intriguing story unfolds through the memories of Alice, as she helps her great nephew to understand the mysteries of his own life. The play shifts seamlessly between the 1930’s, ‘60’s and ‘90’s, from New Zealand to that most romantic of cities, Venice. It touches on the idea of the kiwi “cultural cringe” and the search for our own artistic identity, but is first and foremost a story of love. Based on a story by one of New Zealand’s most highly regarded authors, the postscript on Shadbolt’s original text indicates that the story is based on the life of the painter Ilene Dakin (nee Stichbury) and her marriage to the Canadian poet Lawrence Dakin.
David Young is a respected writer, commentator and journalist. For several years he was deputy editor of the Listener and founding editor of the journal Terra Nova. He has been writing bi-culturally for many years; is the author of Faces of the River, a unique historical geography and Woven by Water, (Huia) histories from the Whanganui River, a study of relations between Maori and Pakeha on the historic river. Our Islands, Our Selves: A History of Conservation in New Zealand was published by Otago University Press in 2004. Whio : Saving New Zealand's Blue Duck was published by the Department of Conservation in Wanganui. Last year David Young was awarded the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writers' Residency. Based at the University of Hawai'i's Centre for Pacific Studies, the three month residency is a partnership between Creative New Zealand, Fulbright New Zealand and the University of Hawai'i. David used the residency to conduct research into what he calls ‘The relationship between the two far ends of Polynesia - New Zealand and Hawai’i.’ His studies will contribute towards a planned publication Hidden Sanctuaries: waters of life in the Pacific and beyond. He says, ‘I intend to publish a series of interconnected essays on sources of water and their centrality to sustaining life, looking especially at traditions and knowledge within the Pacific.’ At the festival David will give a talk entitled, A Three-hundred Year Gaze, in which he will discuss issues to do with the Whanganui River and the implications of his research as the Fullbright-Creative New Zealand Scholar.
For a PDF of the Literary Festival Brochure click on front or back. On this site you can check out the Fringe Festival programme, find a listing of all the events and prices and on the News page you can read about the Poetry Luncheon with Glenn Colquhoun and Kevin Ireland, check out the Two One-Act Plays or check out the Writers in Schools programme. Go to the Home page for an overview of the festival. On this site you can also check out the programme from the 2007 Literary Festival and background on the festival director, Joan Rosier-Jones.
This page was last updated on 31/07/2009