Author Ann Patchett will be coming to New Zealand for the 2024 Auckland Writers Festival. Photo / Emily Dorio
The southern hemisphere’s biggest literary event, the Auckland Writers Festival, has released its first line-up.
If you’ve been to one, you’ll know that writers’ festivals are like Super Bowls for book people. We sit, we hush, we groan internally when someone angles for a comment during audience question time, we glide past spines to meet our stars. We are reduced to reverence and further reading.
The good news is that the country’s — and the southern hemisphere’s — biggest literary event, the Auckland Writers Festival, is nearly here for us to do this all again, where glitsy memoirs usher in audacious debuts, knotty family dramas and the people who made them, from May 14 to 19.
It’s a testament to the festival’s artistic director Lyndsey Fineran, who has been at the helm of putting together what is a wild minor miracle. She comes at organising from a more malleable angle than most.
“No matter how many festivals I’ve been involved in planning, you can never fully predict which authors will say ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘maybe’ or ‘how about this instead?!’ so you have to be adaptable,” she says. “Knowing that you can return to these key principles as your guideposts to keep you on track, help you to make the right calls, and keep your eyes on the bigger picture is invaluable.”
That bigger picture is a sizeable one this year. Her advice? “You’ll get so much more out of it if you allow yourself to head a little off-piste and go listen to something or someone you know nothing about.”
The full programme will be announced next week, but here’s who’s confirmed (so far) and what you should read in anticipation.
Celebrity power is in full swing with headliner Ann Patchett. The American author has collected awards and nominations like faberge eggs: she won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2001 for Bel Canto, about a soprano and a hostage situation in South America; was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for the fairy-tale mansion saga The Dutch House (2019); and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time magazine. She is a gentle and funny writer, one who believes in happy endings or at least human goodness, whose plots are fashioned into figures of families with complicated histories, and who you read when you want something that turns pain into peace but not in a way that’s sap-sweet, like her most recent novel, Tom Lake (2023), an orbiting of a love story told on a cherry farm in Michigan.
British historian Peter Frankopan is a professor of Global History at Oxford University and a writer of epics. His bestseller The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) is ambitious in its scope but immensely readable, charting civilisation along trade routes and the (cultural, religious, monetary) capital that flowed through them. His latest, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (2023), is a sweeping chronicle of climate change and human ecological malfeasance, from the dawn of time to the present day. All of which is to say his books are essential for anyone who could or couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.
Chinese-American author Celeste Ng has a sense for character portraits with a dark, often domestic riptide. Her first book, the best-selling Everything I Never Told You (2014), is a crime story about what happens when a family finds their daughter drowned in a lake. Her second, Little Fires Everywhere (2017), which was made into a mini-series executive-produced by Reese Witherspoon, begins as a suburban whodunit — a house burns down in the manicured area of Shaker Heights, Ohio (the cause: little pyres lit in each of its bedrooms) — and narrows its focus into a slow-burning exploration of womanhood and class. Our Missing Hearts (2022), Ng’s third, steps into speculative fiction, complete with a cautionary authoritarian dystopia and an underground network of librarians.
Who was George Orwell’s wife? In her 2023 release Wifedom, Australian writer, human rights lawyer and television presenter Anna Funder has written a genre-bender, a place of mingled forensic science and fiction that pulls a woman out of obscurity. It takes a lot to offer a counter-account of a literary legacy, especially that of the author behind Animal Farm and 1984, but Funder has approached this with the incisiveness she has brought to her other works, including Stasiland (2003), about East Germany’s repressive tyranny, and All That I Am (2011), her novel about German pacifists, which won the Miles Franklin, Australia’s premier literary prize. Funder seems to grapple with a sort of unearthing impulse, and her books are all the better for it.
Abraham Verghese’s gift is his ability to spin splendid threads of things that pull us together. He is, in this way, a physician and a professor at Stanford University Medical School, but also an excellent memoirist and novelist. His The Covenant of Water (2023), spread over 70 years in Kerala and which spent six months on the New York Times bestseller list, doubles down on the premise of a family curse where, every generation, a member drowns. It is a tale that leans on the cyclical, on birth and death and the converging of plotlines, and the things that we inherit in the process. It shares all of this with his first novel, Cutting for Stone (2009), which also had aspirations of a years-long saga: over five decades and three continents, Verghese tells a tale of twins, born conjoined, and half a century of Ethiopia.
When Vietnamese-American professor, New York Times columnist and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote The Sympathizer (2015), a politically charged novel of ideas masquerading as a spy story, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, he wrote it with “something to offend everyone”, he told the Guardian. Nguyen is like that: sharp and well-attuned to social and cultural systems, to the point that he can paint it all through subterfuge. His memoir, A Man of Two Faces (2023), has also been lauded as unconventional but brilliant, another distillation of his powers of portraiture and polemic, a rippling of intellect.
Of course, there’s a rugby darling. Former All Blacks fly-half Dan Carter, oft-described as one of the world’s best rugby players, scoring game-defining points and breaking records, has a book out. Titled The Art of Winning (2023), it reads like a treatise on leadership, something you’d expect from a book subtitled 10 Lessons in Leadership, Purpose and Potential. But what could easily become self-help fodder is also about how one person turned their greatness (sporting prowess) into another kind of greatness (lifestyle prowess), of a person marked by so many dichotomies in life (the coach, the charity supporter, the dad, the Chemist Warehouse face, the Louis Vuitton friend-of-the-brand).
If there is any person who has given definite shape to the history of New Zealand literature, it is Patricia Grace (Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, Te Āti Awa). She carries the weight and significance of a first: in 1975, her short story collection Waiariki was the first book published by a Māori woman in Aotearoa. Anyone who has read her will know that she is a formidable stylist — Grace won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction for Potiki (1986), was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001 for Dogside Story, won the Children’s Picture Book of the Year for The Kuia and the Spider (1981), and took home several awards for Tu (2004). She is also a prolific one, having published more than 35 titles ranging from novels to books for children, and now a short story collection, Bird Child and Other Stories, at the age of 86.
New Zealand poet Tusiata Avia has felt it all in the wake of her The Savage Coloniser Book (2020), an unflinching work that garnered death threats and was adapted for the stage for the Auckland Arts Festival. Her new collection, Big Fat Brown Bitch (2023), is in a way a response for the Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit and Ockham NZ Book Award winner. Avia writes with an honesty that cuts to the bone, on colonisation, on the racism she has experienced, while affirming herself as one of the country’s foremost wordsmiths. At this year’s Auckland Writers Festival, she’ll chat to journalist and playwright Victor Rodger about craft and creation, and will perform poems from her new collection.
The full programme for the Auckland Writers Festival will be released on March 13 at midday. Tickets are on sale from March 15.
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