Thousands pack the Anzac Hall as Featherston's book festival draws record crowds. Photo / Lucia Zanmonti
Kathy Young explores the Featherston Book Festival and asks if books can still connect us.
Generative AI is everywhere, but in one special town, the spectre has lifted in favour of human connection and real literature.
Wherever you look, alarm bells are ringing about the pervasive influence of AI software. People are rightly asking; is what we read, see, and hear one day going to be entirely generated content? Yet one antidote to the influence of AI might be found in the growing national re-engagement with books, reading and storytelling. By showing up in big numbers at book festivals and events, New Zealanders are signalling they want to connect with real people, to share how books have changed their lives. It was evident during my weekend at the annual Featherston Booktown Karukatea Festival, we have not yet forgotten the power of a good book.
Featherston lies a short drive or relaxed train ride from Wellington, on the other side of the Remutaka Ranges, and is Aotearoa’s only officially recognised booktown. Modelling their very own rural literary hub on the famous Hay-on-Wye, Wales, booktown, the organisers have succeeded in putting Featherston firmly on the bookish map.
This Wellington commuter town of 2700 formerly served as the place you drove through to get to Greytown or Martinborough. So in 2014, founders and locals Peter and Mary Biggs and a handful of like-minded neighbours sat down and had a yarn.
Booktowns, Mary explains, share a common DNA. “They’re small rural towns, usually surrounded by beauty, an hour or two from a major city, with their best days supposedly behind them.” Featherston ticked every box. “When we presented the idea to the mayor of South Wairarapa District, she leaned back in her chair and said, ‘Thank God. No one knows what to do with Featherston’.”
The first festival, in 2015, was tiny, with about 2000 visitors and 15 events. This year, between May 8-10, more than 10,000 people attendedacross 47 events with 72 writers, storytellers and “provocateurs”.
When Featherston Booktown began there was one bookshop in the town. Now there are eight. According to Peter Biggs, affectionately known as Biggsy, the three-day festival generates an estimated $2.74 million in annual economic benefits.
Award-winning novelist Catherine Chidgey said to me during the festival, “You feel like you’re in on a special secret when you come to Featherston”. So what is it they are putting in the water over there? The answer seems to be a sense of community and inclusivity. Tamariki from local schools perform the kapa haka at the opening night. A fish and chips supper is prepared from a caravan out the back of the Anzac Hall. About 140 volunteers mobilise across the town. This year, All Blacks’ coach Gilbert Enoka drew an 400-strong crowd to the opening event.
Over the course of the weekend, the audience (roughly 50 per cent rural and 50 per cent urban, according to Biggsy) come along to listen to a wide range of writers, from best-selling authors like Chidgey to emerging new voices such as Joseph Trinidad. There are poets, historians, journalists and politicians. Biggsy calls it a refusal to programme for only a small, elilte, urban, bourgeois audience. Panel discussions going on while the Zip and the pie-warmer are humming in the corner. Meanwhile, in one of the school classrooms, people settle in for one of Dominic Hoey’s “How to Write Good” workshops, while the poster on the wall reads “Attitude is a little thing that can make a big difference”. The craft of the book is also central to the festival, with workshops available on book-binding, paper- and press-making. There are events for young people too, including a nature walk and talk.
“We’re ruthlessly mainstream,” says Biggsy. “But at the same time, ruthlessly provocative and ruthlessly focused on high-quality programming,” The formula – judging by the packed rooms – is working.
Jordan Hamel, the festival’s director, calls it a “place-shaping mechanism” for Featherston. “Sessions are scattered across halls, schools and community spaces. You navigate the festival on foot. The town is the venue.” It’s small enough to feel like you can get your arms around it, and big enough to feel like you’re part of something bigger. This is a town celebrating what it loves about itself and celebrating the power of words and books, to connect people.
One volunteer I spoke to said, “People love it. We’ve all experienced that feeling of going on holiday and getting a different take on life. Well, Featherston Book Festival is like that. You’re in a new place to hear bold conversations, fresh ideas and all these amazing writers speak, and you just feel uplifted.”
The conviction at the festival’s heart — that the human voice behind words matters — is one its organisers hold fiercely. “I don’t see [AI] as a viable threat, because I don’t see it ever replacing the human voice,” says Jordan. “When we read, we read for the story, but we also read for the person behind the story.” Peter is more blunt. “Literature and art need to be the last remaining place where human beings can relate to each other as human beings — to create things that move and inspire and confront other human beings.”
This is, ultimately, what I came to Featherston for. The decision to travel, the act of arrival, the minor disorientation of being somewhere new, all add to the experience. Being somewhere in person matters. You come to be moved.
Featherston, with its festival and bookshops, sense of nostalgia and incredibly hospitable community, is proof that the arts, and books in particular, can make our communities, and our country, a better place. It’s worth showing up for.
Featherston is 50 minutes by car from Wellington, or one hour by train from Wellington Railway Station.
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