Auckland Writers Festival: Writers pay homage to power of cats

CK Stead acknowledged that in the past he was dogmatically opinionated. Photo / Dean Purcell

A record-breaking 60,000 people turned up for the Auckland Writers Festival at the weekend.

Cats were a feature of the Auckland Writers Festival weekend, thanks to two senior authors.

On Saturday, headline act Haruki Murakami, wearing a T-shirt featuring a cat silhouette above the words "Keep Calm and Read Murakami", talked about how the family cat was his only friend when he was growing up: "My parents didn't understand [me] at all. I love my books, I love my music, I love my cat."

2015 Honoured New Zealand Writer CK Stead closed the festival last night with three poems including an elegy to his dead cat, Zac. When Stead had a problem with a poem "Zac the Knife", according to the elegy, "slept on it".

Stead told the audience he finds it hard to recognise himself in his irascible public image, but now assesses that in the past he was dogmatically opinionated. "They were damn good opinions, but I was too emphatic, too forceful, too excited really."

A record-breaking estimated festival audience of 60,000 meant author-signing queues up to two hours long and dozens of people turned away at free events. Five awards were announced over the five days, including the $12,000 Sarah Broom Memorial Poetry prize, won by Wellington poet Diana Bridge.

Critic Daniel Mendelsohn spoke of the mysteries of taste, the need to inhabit your own culture - "I watch Scandal, no one gets to tell me there's anything wrong with that" - and the importance of judgment.

"We are increasingly an anti-judgment society. 'Who am I to judge?' we say. You're someone with a brain! I believe very strongly that the reason we have intelligence is to make judgments about things."

British-Nigerian novelist Ben Okri held his audience spellbound as he spoke with gravitas on the quiet magic of reality. He aims to trigger internal journeys in his readers: "We tend to treat books as machines of page turning. But for me [books are] an excuse for meditation."

Now in her mid 80s but looking 15 years younger, playwright and novelist Renee was cheered onstage by a small but rapturous contingent. She's publishing her new trilogy, inspired by "superior chick lit", as a weekly serial on her website wednesdaybusk.com. She describes the heroine as an irritable, pedantic feminist, obsessed with apostrophes.

BBC journalist Bill Hayton told a history of disappeared maps, mistranslations, false evidence secretly planted and pirates in his Michael King Memorial Lecture on a maritime border dispute. China claims to own most of the South China Sea, insisting strategic islets have been Chinese "since ancient times". But Hayton has evidence the claim is "no more ancient than some of the people sitting in this room".