Soul-baring revelations with a smattering of humour

Thomas Keneally. Photo / Supplied

A near-full house of fans greeted Australian writer Thomas Keneally when he walked on stage at the ASB Centre yesterday morning for an hour of soul-baring revelations and a great deal of humour.

The session was chaired by Brian Edwards, who confessed he was a professed non-reader - until he saw the film Schindler's List - then read the book, by Keneally, followed by many others in the writer's considerable back-catalogue.

The benignly charismatic Keneally talked about his childhood in Campsie, a small town where the Aboriginal camp outside town served as an unofficial brothel, which was one form of racist transaction, while the Aboriginals were subject to segregated seating in the local cinema.

Keneally's mother was a huge force in his life, and probably a major influence in his political outlook. She wanted to live to see John Howard defeated, he told the audience, and she did. Just as importantly, her mantra was that a child with a book is never bored, a belief that served the asthmatic lad well.

Keneally, who trained for years for the seminary then withdrew because he found it hard to believe in certain doctrines (and he was interested in girls), told Edwards that writing sometimes made him drunk with joy. He's a little disappointed, though, that Schindler's List maker Steven Spielberg has "refused to make any other films from my books".

The enthusiastic response at the end of the session, and the long queue of people waiting for him to sign copies of his books, made Keneally one of the festival's great successes.

Downstairs, in the NZI Room, New Zealand writers Emily Perkins and Damien Wilkins were chaired by Fergus Barrowman, the literature teacher who gave both of them A+ for their academic work when they were first starrting out learning their craft.

Wilkins described how he'd been "incredibly shy and ashamed of his writing" in the early stages of his career and that he writes with the idea in his head that a mentor is peering over his shoulder, reading his work. He said his aim was to transcend himself in his writing, that he wanted to make a book that was better than him.

Perkins said she too had a kind of auditor in her head, insisting that she writes with a sense of humour and a moral compass. She read some passages from a new novel, a drama of family relationships. If the book lives up to the promise of this early glimpse, I can't wait for its release.

Young Bond writer Charlie Higson attracted a pleasing number of teenage kids into the audience, pleasingly, more boys than girls. Prodded by David Farrier, Higson said he started writing stories when he was 11, then got diverted in adulthood into comedy writing and acting. When he was invited to write the five Bond books, he read chapters to his sons as bedtime stories, "which is why the books are so violent".

His new YA series, which began with zombie horror The Enemy, is aimed at scaring the pants off kids. Once again, his youngest son was the test audience, but Higson's writing wasn't frightening enough. He kept pushing the ante on the horror until one night, the boy came downstairs bawling his eyes out. His dad's book had given him a nightmare. "Yes!" said Higson.

The American librarians and teachers who censor teenage reading in America have demanded that The Enemy be toned down, and that the teenage heroes be aged by two years, to 16. Higson thought he might put librarians into his next zombie horror book. When question time came, a youngster asked a primary question many adult are too timid to pose: "Which was the book that made you the most money?"