Reviews

Review by Jodine Stodart

Peace Please:  Four writers on the experience of war talk with Robert Sullivan at the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival May 2011, Aotea Centre.

Interestingly, the Readers and Writers Festival  event ‘Peace Please’ began with a negation of the title itself.

“We should not ever beg for peace”, says Izzeldin Abuelaish, “we need to take action and responsibility.”

Izzeldin Ab [ ... ]

As I walked up Queen St, in anticipation of attending a chaired conversation between leading experts on climate change, I was disturbed every few seconds by signs demanding I stop and shop, insisting that whatever it was, I needed it.  I texted my sister in disdain; “I just read a sign in the window of Jay Jays: “If it makes you happy, buy it.”"

This frustrating experience and final admonishment to buy set  [ ... ]

My first day back as a writer for Morph magazine finds me at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, taking on the task of reviewing some of the Saturday programme. It’s a beautiful autumn morn, slightly marred by the looming and uncharismatic Aotea Centre, where the bulk of the festival takes place. It’s certainly buzzing, though in a low hum sort of way, with lots of interesting and intellectual looking folk [ ... ]

A family history tarnished with six suicides and a murder sounds so similar to a Shakespearean tragedy it’s enough to drive anyone to write. Such is David Vann’s background.

Before the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival's An Hour with David Vann, I had no knowledge of the man behind the work. My expectations of him were chiselled from his latest and most popular books, Legend of a Suicide and Caribou Island,  [ ... ]

At the beginning of this event, John Freeman, related a story of how, Oscar Wilde, when enquiring about the sales of his recent book, sent a telegraph with a singular symbol “?” Wilde’s publisher replied to this telegram with an equally expressive communication “!” This apt exemplar of the poignancy and effect of the time worn phrase ‘less is more’ is what Freeman advocated and I slurped up greedily at  [ ... ]

I hadn’t planned on spending an hour in the life of CK Stead. I was idly eavesdropping on someone’s conversation at book club  when they mentioned how much they were looking forward to this event at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival; I checked my programme; I went along.

The room was smaller and the décor more low-key than the other events I saw. Two of the same, stackable chairs that the audience sat on [ ... ]

William Butler Yeats published the poem 'Sailing to Byzantium‘ in the poetry collection The Tower in 1928. What stands at the centre of this time-honoured piece of poetry is the unswerving belief that art, in all its manifestations, is what outlives us. According to Yeats, art possesses this potential for extension over time, culture and space because of its inherent capacity to be the “singing-master[s] of my so [ ... ]

It is often the event least anticipated that will undoubtedly secure a place at the top of your festival list as ‘thought-provoking’.  I was blown away by the impact the event Can the Arts Save the Planet? had on me. I came away from the event with more questions and concerns than when I went in, a sign of an engaging lecture. Whether I swallow every word of it, is another story.

Witty, informative, and packed fu [ ... ]

Religion: What is it Good for?

Remarkably, as Chair Sean Plunket stated, it took the three panellists of Religion: What is it Good for? forty minutes before journalists were blamed for the creation of media silence and the reluctance to discuss religion, a typical Plunket observation which met with uproars of laughter and delight, nowhere more so than in the press rows where I was seated. I relish direct confrontati [ ... ]

An Hour with Lionel Shriver in conversation with Charlotte Grimshaw Death and So Much More

Lionel Shriver is one of the literary superstars of this year’s Auckland Readers and Writers Festival.  Despite her ten novels from 1986 onwards, and a journalistic career which includes a spell at The Economist and a current place at The Guardian, Shriver was relatively unknown until her Orange Prize Winning We Need To Ta [ ... ]