The best sessions we saw at the Aotea Centre last weekend.

The crowds draw in and spill out of the Aotea Centre like waves for six days. First it’s school students – six thousand of them. Then it’s the general public and the 240 writers programmed onto the stages. This year’s festival attracted 85,000 attendances (on par with last year’s record-breaking numbers) and sold a whopping 12,000 books – Catherine Chidgey’s just-released The Book of Guilt was the top selling title.

Everyone who attended the festival will have had a different experience: so much is on at the same time and there are events to suit many and various tastes, ages, budgets and interests. Sometimes the funnest parts are the inbetween times: meeting up with fellow festivalgoers and swapping notes, bumping into writers, making badges up on Level 5 with your kids, ravenously eating a smashed potato from the smashed potato truck in the square. The scale and intensity of Auckland Writers Festival’s buzz is a testament both to the feat of organisation that the festival team achieved, and to the passionate community of readers and writers who showed up and got stuck in.

Spinoff staff wove in and out of the festival (including the unusually suspenseful Ockham New Zealand Book Awards ceremony) and reviewed what they went to:

Gala Night: The Moment I Knew

This was one of the best Gala night’s I’ve been to. The format is that eight writers have to stand in front of 2,000 people and tell a story based on a theme. This year’s theme was “the moment I knew”. Highlights were Australian journalist Stan Grant’s story about why he always roots for the not-Australian team to win; Lemn Sissay on the story of why he always thought his name was Norman (absolutely devastating tale told by one of the most vibrant and light-filled presences); David Nicholls on his failed career as an actor (charming! So charming!); and Colm Toíbín’s hysterical memories of eating the body of Christ and never asking if it remained flesh and blood once it hit the guts. Get the man on the comedy circuit. What made this night particularly great is that almost all the writers stuck to the brief (tell a true story, no notes). / Claire Mabey

Ruth Shaw: A Life at the End of the World

I’m in awe of Ruth Shaw. She’s a globally bestselling author and a deeply interesting woman. This session was very well chaired by Elisabeth Easther who gently drew out Shaw’s humour, her intellect and glimpses of her vast and often very difficult life. Shaw talked about her love of books and her early and successful attempts at writing (thanks to a teacher); she discussed having a vaginal prolapse and her activism for women’s health; her love and respect for her fourth husband, Lance; and the immense pressure of busloads of visitors coming to her Manapouri bookshops to connect with her in person, and how her life has had to adjust to cope. Fascinating person, wonderful books, excellent conversation. / CM

Lee Murray’s talk about speculative fiction in the Schools programme

Auckland Writers Festival’s schools programme is a beast. Thousands of students pour into sessions over two days in the Aotea Centre – it’s absolutely epic and inspiring. Lee Murray gave a brilliant illustrated lecture on speculative fiction, including the books that carved the way, and how it can be used to put what we want into the world. I was watching the students watching Lee and they were riveted – I expect there will be more than a few spec fic novels underway by now. / CM

Being a NZ Writer Today

The Spinoff’s Mad Chapman chaired Whiti Hereaka, Damien Wilkins and Lynley Edmeades in a conversation about the realities of trying to be a writer in Aotearoa. They covered whether creative writing courses are for everyone (basically you don’t need them but they work… Hereaka said her one-year MA boosted her 10 years; that it propelled her writing because of the intensity; Wilkins said it’s the community that people find important, as well as becoming a better reader). They discussed the fact that making money is not part of the equation here – the market is too small. They discussed agents, too: Wilkins and Edmeades don’t have one; Hereaka does. But the advice was that it’s good to have one due to aforementioned tiny market. The conversation was equal parts depressing and uplifting. Basically, perseverance and self-belief and drive is what you need, no matter what else is or isn’t on the table. / CM

Rock Solid: Sacha Cotter & Josh Morgan at Pukapuka Adventures

Cotter (writer) and Morgan (illustrator) make some of Aotearoa’s best picture books. Their latest is called A Guide to Rocks and their Auckland Writers Festival appearance was the very first time it has been seen by the public. Reader, I cried. It is the most beautiful story of learning how to talk about your feelings so that you can truly get close to your family. Told with the metaphor of rocks that grow and grow, and an old family guidebook, it’s entertaining as well as deeply useful for conversations about unburdening yourself. The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous – and Cotter’s prose pitch perfect. After a terrific dramatised reading they played a new song to go with the book and it’s a BANGER. Someone give them a recording deal! Absolute heroes, these two. / CM

Let The Dead Speak Kia Kōrero Te Hunga Mate

It can be jarring being one of only a handful of brown faces in a Writers Festival session talking about how much creative licence we have when telling the stories of our tūpuna. Thankfully, panel chair Hirini Kaa insisted those unfamiliar with concepts such as tapu search for an explanation online, rather than getting the panel to explain it. Instead, the crowd was treated to vivid poetry from Whiti Hereaka, an imaginative waiata from Ariana Tikao, and striking film excerpts written by Tim Worall that all served as incredible examples of how we can respectfully enable the dead to talk. For those of us in the crowd who have pondered how best to navigate bringing the past to life, the kōrero confirmed that the best way to do it is carefully, respectfully, and always by adhering to tikanga – lest we suffer the consequences. The practice of doing what was spoken about was probably most aptly displayed by the beautiful karanga a whaea performed at the end of the session to thank the panel for their kōrero. / Liam Rātana

All Animals are Equal?

“It was like we were in a theatre and suddenly the back fell off,” said Mathilde Walter Clark, the Danish author of A Blind Eye, a groundbreaking work about the treatment and culling of mink in Denmark. She described seeing news clips on Denmark’s mink cull in 2020 and not being able to take her eyes off the farms and cages in the background. She felt like suddenly she could see the ropes and pulleys that made the theatre work, as the media refused to talk about the mink as animals – instead they were products and lost revenue. 

Walter Clark was in conversation with Elisabeth Easther and for a brief time, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, author of Animalia, who had to rush out sick. Before he left, he managed to tell us about his experience visiting a pig farm 17 years ago where he “witnessed the collapse of our humanity”. Walter Clark insisted that actually, she isn’t interested in mink, or animal rights, any more than the next person and that writing a book about them was “not a dream scenario”. It was just that she couldn’t unsee the collapse of the theatre, and what it said about us as humans. From loose pages of a very fresh English translation of the book, she read a beautiful passage about what mink are like in their natural habitat, and how native Americans see them. More than a book about mink, it’s one about language, reality-making, story telling and the human condition.

This was an incredible session and it was free – so please, if you’re broke, don’t discount coming to the festival. / Gabi Lardies

Asako Yuzuki: Japan’s Trailblazer

Asako Yuzuki’s novel Butter has topped international charts – including ours – and joined Paula Morris on stage with a interpreter. It was a hilarious hour, with Yuzuki starting by admitting that in Japan, she is not popular, not invited to literary festivals and almost always interviewed by people who have not read her book and probably never will. She was full of self-depreciating humour, and when she found out that in New Zealand we also often don’t value our own until they’re celebrated overseas she said “So there’s no paradise then.” An excellent question from the crowd – asking if the two main characters’ relationship almost veering into romance was purposeful – opened a response that got to the core of the characters. These are women who have never thought about sexual pleasure for themselves, said Yuzuki. When they meet, the patriarchal pressures of society are somewhat un-internalised and so things open up. The grand finale of the session was staff taking photos of Yuzuki with the rambunctious loving crowd, so that she can prove back home that she’s popular here. / GL

Worldwide Book Club: Sámi Literature

I popped up to the Kōrero Corner to hear Sámi journalist and writer Elin Anna Labba’s recommendations of indigenous Sámi literature. The Kōrero Corner was a cosy space on the top floor where events were more casual and intimate and always free. The sessions were somewhat syncopated with the bigger events, so that when they finished downstairs, the chaos of jabbering people floated up, and Labba hoped we could still hear her “small voice”. She made the effort to make sure she only recommended books that are available to us, so that cut down the options to a handful. Among them were Myths, Tales, and Poetry from Four Centuries of Sámi Literature and Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius. The highest recommendation was for Aednan, a poetry book by Linnea Axelsson. “When you read the book it feels like you’re up on a mountaintop,” said Labba. / GL

The 2024 Booker Prize Winner: Samantha Harvey

I went to see Samantha Harvey and found what she had to say deeply interesting. Orbital, her slim 136-page novel about a single day on the International Space Station, won last year’s Booker Prize. Harvey did a beautiful job explaining how the heck she wrote a crazy good novel about a setting (space) and place (the ISS) that she has never been to. The NASA website, she said, is a treasure trove of info. The ISS has a live stream, she said, but it seldom works. Her stories about negotiating a plotless novel set in space with her publishers were illuminating and funny. Harvey also spoke about a recent lit prize she judged which required her to read 100+ novels. She was struck by how many seemed to shut the reader out. In her own writing she aims to invite readers in and honour their generous spirit. It’s an act of generosity, Harvey said, to read a novel when a million other things demand your attention. The signing line was huge. / Liv Sisson

How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive

An expertly chaired discussion between Spinoff editor-at-large Toby Manhire and political scientist Marcel Dirsus. The talk was necessarily bleak, with insights into the minds and actions of tyrants (think dictators, kings etc) the world over, but Dirsus was persistently optimistic about the future, making the Saturday morning session a surprisingly uplifting start to the weekend. The shadow of Donald Trump fell on a number of sessions throughout the festival, and proved a winning ticket, with Dirsus’s Saturday session selling out so quickly they added a near-identical encore on Sunday. / Mad Chapman