Gripping tales pull record crowds to hear writers

A.A. Gill's session packed out the Aotea Centre's ASB Theatre. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Audience numbers for the 11th Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, which ended last night, are the highest yet - just over 32,000 people attended, a 21 per cent rise on last year's 26,500.

The festival was greatly boosted by A.A. Gill's Friday night session, which sold out all four levels of the ASB Theatre at the Aotea Centre, but many sessions through the weekend attracted healthy audience numbers.

Yesterday's headliner, Izzeldin Abuelaish, also attracted an ardent audience of people wanting to listen to his terrible story.

The doctor, born and raised in poverty in a Gaza Strip refugee camp but highly motivated to educate himself, commuted to a Tel Aviv hospital each week to work.

His wife died of leukaemia in late 2008, leaving him to care for their eight young children. At 4.45pm on January 16, 2009, two Israeli missiles were shot at his apartment, killing three of his daughters and a niece. The doctor had just left the room.

Hosted by Herald editor Tim Murphy, Dr Abuelaish spoke emotionally about seeing one daughter drowning in a sea of blood, another decapitated.

Remarkably, he decided right from the start not to hate the attackers - the Israeli Defence Force - but to try and "have the moral courage to spread the message" of peace.

His book, I Shall Not Hate, is both a tribute to his wife and children and a plea for people who may otherwise "burn with hate" to spend their lives doing good deeds in their communities.

Murphy pointed out that he had received an email from the Israeli Embassy in Wellington claiming that Hamas snipers had been spotted on the roof of the doctor's apartment, a claim Dr Abuelaish, now living in Toronto, angrily rejected.

He's heard it all before - and he has never received an apology.

"They don't take responsibility, they are telling stories to justify," he said, vehemently.

The doctor is taking legal action against the Israeli Government; if he wins, all proceeds will go to his charity, Girls For Life.

He concluded the session by reading a poem from his book sent to him by an Israeli neighbour on the death of his daughter, and received a standing ovation, a rare occurrence at the festival.

The panel on Saving the World, featuring New Zealand polar environmental scientist Grant Redvers, American evolutionary geneticist Fred Allendorf, American science historian Naomi Oreskes and Australian environmental campaigner Paul Gilding, chaired by Sean Plunket, discussed fundamental issues threatening the environment and therefore the human race.

You just wish the relevant politicians were in attendance as the panel discussed mining, the sea of rhetoric, exploding population growth, the futility of consumerism - and, as Sean Plunket put it, "a country where people line up to buy a burger that's the equivalent of two cups of lard".

All of them predicted some sort of catastrophe that would force change within the next 20 years.

Bill Manhire hosted an hour with young American novelist David Vann, who, despite having a family history that includes five suicides and a murder, was charming and humorous, as is his new novel Caribou Island, about a middle-aged couple's marriage disintegrating on an Alaskan island.