KEY POINTS:
British biographer Hermione Lee had the capacity audience laughing throughout her Michael King Lecture on Saturday. Lee, who has written masterly studies of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen, focused on the subject of her latest book, the American writer Edith Wharton. She proved quite the mimic as she discussed the life of a complicated woman who wrote with ruthless wit.
Lee brought to life a Wharton short story character, a woman addicted to lecturing, with a prodigious memory for incorrect facts. She ended with a hilarious Wharton piece, on getting lost in Windsor with her friend Henry James, demonstrating the contrast between James the windbag and Wharton the soul of concision.
Another British biographer, Simon Montefiore, followed half an hour later with an intriguing insight into how to get access, then lose it, to the Kremlin archives to research Stalin, the subject of two of his books. At one stage, President Putin was a fan of Montefiore's work, and all doors were open, but as Putin developed a harder line, Montefiore was blanked.
Montefiore's research anecdotes included the time he followed an extremely large fellow up the stairs towards the archives - until the man suddenly vanished. He had fallen through a hole in the floor. On another occasion, in Georgia, the janitor had seized power as the archivist and given himself the title of "Professor".
The "You know you're done with a story" session with Peter Ho Davies, Anne Enright and New Zealand writer Sarah Laing was a lowkey affair in which the authors discuss the virtues or otherwise of the short story. Enright, last year's Booker Prize winner, was particularly entertaining, with a biting sense of humour.
Australian crime writer Peter Temple talked about his early life in South Africa under the crushing weight of apartheid in front of a small audience including J. M. Coetzee and Witi Ihimaera. As a newspaper subeditor, he learned to cut reporters' copy from 70cm to 4cm. No wonder his prose is taut.
Audience numbers for Australian writer Luke Davies' hour were also disappointing, but he had a terrific session, reading from God of Speed and Candy, and showing a clip from the film of the latter starring Heath Ledger. Davies, a junkie for 10 years, insisted Candy is not a memoir. But was partly based upon a girl he knew during those days. She was much wilder than Candy.
