Three of the country's most talented young writers visited Masterton to mark Writers and Readers Week, part of this year's International Arts Festival.
Eleanor Catton, Craig Cliff and Hamish Clayton read from their books and discussed their literary careers for a large crowd at Aratoi at lunchtime yesterday.
Organiser DavidHedley said having the three writers was a coup.
"It's good to have them here," he said.
"They are only in their 20s but they have already each produced a book of international class, which is pretty stunning."
Eleanor Catton's 2008 novel The Rehearsal won the Montana Best First Book Award for Fiction and was highly rated by, among others, The Guardian. She said it was sometimes hard talking about the book as it was written several years ago.
"I'm already quite a way in to my next project, so I'm having to look back and think about it all over again," she said.
"But we all did a [speaking] session at the Embassy in Wellington the other day, so I'm getting used to it."
Hamish Clayton, author of the highly rated novel Wulf, said speaking about his book in public was a sometimes unnerving process. "It's quite unnatural for me," he said.
"I find it a bit wierd, because writing is a very personal thing. But then, people have been basically quite nice.
"I haven't had anyone come to any of the talks to throw abuse at me just yet, anyway."
Craig Cliff is the author of the novel A Man Melting.
