KEY POINTS:
Hmm. A timetable clash already as the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival begins today in earnest at the Aotea Centre with some of its big-gun guests.
Welsh-Chinese novelist Peter Ho Davies or New Zealand treasure Shonagh Koea? Both are on at the same time - 11.30am - but
as one can't do both, Koea it is.
Her memoir, The Kindness of Strangers, is a lovely, affecting read about growing up in a family which was not so kind to young Shonagh.
Today she'll be in conversation with her friend, writer Peter Wells. Koea is a warm and witty talker, and Wells will bring out the best in her.
If I could defy the laws of physics, though, I'd still try somehow to see Davies, whose first novel The Welsh Girl is set in Wales in the last days of World War II.
Davies, who has been compared to James Joyce, will also appear at 4.30pm in a panel discussion called Bloodlines, with New Zealand writer Maxine Alterio and Nobel whiz-kid Junot Diaz, whose Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has enchanted many.
Yesterday, the Herald featured an interview with London economist and journalist Loretta Napoleoni about the futility of aid to Africa, which is just one aspect of her complex new book, Rogue Economics.
Judging by the volume of outraged emails in response to the story - how dare she be rude about Bono? - Napoleoni is a writer who excites passions. Mark Sainsbury talks to her today at 1pm.
At 3pm there's another clash, between Roger Hall talking to Fiona Samuel about his long career as the country's most successful playwright, and Owen Scott and Annie Goldson discussing the art of turning a book into a documentary.
Goldson has made a highly regarded film of Scott's memoir, Deep Beyond the Reef, about his brother's murder in Fiji.
I'll be off to see Sarah Hall, Simon Montefiore and Luke Davies at 6pm in a session called History and the Novel, where burlesque characters (from Hall's Electric Michelangelo) Howard Hughes (Davies' God of Speed), and Stalin and Rasputin (Montefiore's Sashenka) will hopefully emerge.
Anyone who wants to see what the ever-so-reclusive Nobel prize-winner J. M. Coetzee is like in public will have to go to see him for the official "opening night" session at 8pm where he'll be on stage with Hall, Diaz and Witi Ihimaera.
