The line-up for this year's Whanganui Literary Festival features a number of celebrated and award-winning New Zealand writers.
One of these is fiction writer and comic artist Sarah Laing. Raised in Palmerston North, Sarah has lived in Munich, New York and Auckland, and currently resides in Wellington. Her latest bookis the daring graphic novel Mansfield and Me, published in 2016 by Victoria University Press to critical acclaim.
This August, Sarah is one of three New Zealand writers travelling to the Edinburgh International Book festival, along with Hera Lindsay Bird and Courtney Sina Meredith. They will be accompanied by WORD Christchurch programme director and former Whanganui Literary Festival guest Rachael King. In Edinburgh, Sarah will run a reading workshop on the work of Katherine Mansfield, and give a talk on graphic novels.
Sarah is having a busy year, with appearances at Auckland Writer's Festival, Going West, Marlborough Book Festival and more.
This October she will join us in Whanganui, where we will be treated to a discussion and slideshow about Mansfield and Me, and Sarah's other projects, including her popular comic blog Let Me Be Frank. The blog features regular comics on a range of subjects including procrastination, cats, diabetes, music, parenting, ambition and self-doubt. The comic form and Sarah's unique drawing style are particularly suited to the personal nature of much of the material. Mansfield and Me charts the author's development of a writing career alongside the life of one of her literary heroes, Katherine Mansfield. The interwoven chapters find multiple intersections between their lives: from holidays at Days Bay to Her First Ball, to family, relationships and illness.
Reviewer Sarah Forster writes: "This book is a fabulous piece of work, and one that will stick around in Mansfield's oeuvre, ensuring Sarah Laing's name stays in the public consciousness. And that it ought to." Paula Green writes: "Mansfield and Woolf wanted to showcase a new way of writing - Sarah has picked up that torch. This is groundbreaking. It deserves an international audience."
Sarah's appearance at Edinburgh will help bring international attention to her work. Here in Whanganui, we look forward to expanding the local audience.
