Going West Books & Writers Festival 2008

Literary Weekend Biographies

Chris Price - In trouble with the truth

Chris Price has been the 2008 Auckland University Writer in Residence at the Michael King Writers' Centre, where she completed a poetry collection, The Blind Singer (due in 2009 from Auckland University Press), and embarked on a 'digressive biography' of the nineteenth-century poet, anatomist and suicide, Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Her most recent book, the Montana-shortlisted Brief Lives, has the skeleton of a biographical dictionary, flesh of prose, and the heart of a poet. She has collaborated with New Zealand physicists on the Are Angels OK? anthology, and won the Montana Award for Best First Book of Poetry in 2002 with Husk. Chris edited the literary journal Landfall for much of the 90s, and was for many years coordinator of Writers and Readers Week for the New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington. Nowadays she teaches creative writing at Victoria University.

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Niki Harr - Warming up

Niki Harr‚ is a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland where she has taught social and community psychology for 10 years. Her recent research projects have focused on psychological wellbeing, positive youth development and political activism. She is particularly interested in how to engage people in actively creating a sustainable society. Alongside this, Niki also has an interest in transport behaviour and has worked with local councils and schools on several initiatives to encourage young people to drive safely. She lives in hope that one day teenagers will think buses and bikes are cooler than cars.

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Alison Wong - China downunder

Alison Wong

Alison Wong's great grandparents came to New Zealand from China in the late 19th century. She grew up in Hawke's Bay and, apart from several years in China, has spent most of her adult life in the Wellington region. She was the 2002 Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University, and her collection, Cup, was a finalist for the Best First Book for Poetry at the 2007 Montana Book Awards. Her poetry was selected for Best New Zealand Poems 2007 and 2006, and her first novel, As the Earth Turns, will be published in 2009 by Penguin New Zealand and Picador Australia, UK and Hong Kong.

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Renee Liang - China downunder

Renee Liang is a poet, playwright and fiction writer. She is an MC at Poetry Live and organises other events aimed at bringing the Auckland arts community closer together. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing and is working on her first novel. Her play Lantern was written and performed in 2008 and a short play, Mask, will be performed in two centres. Her work can be seen in various NZ literary journals and she has released two small poetry books, Chinglish and Cardiac Cycle. She is an occasional paediatrician. Renee's writing riffs on themes of cross-cultural heartache, family, love, loss and living in New Zealand.

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Mo Zhi Hong - China downunder

Mo Zhi Hong

Mo Zhi Hong was born in Singapore but grew up in Taiwan, China, Canada, the United States of America and New Zealand. During the dot-com boom of the 1990s he worked as a software developer in New York City, and later as an English teacher in north-east China, before recently returning to New Zealand. He is 35 years old. The Year of the Shanghai Shark, published this year, is his first novel.

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Gilbert Wong - China downunder

Gilbert Wong leads the communications team at the Human Rights Commission. He moonlights as a contributing writer and theatre reviewer for Metro where he was associate editor and the arts editor. Prior to Metro he worked as the arts and books editor, the travel editor and Weekend features editor at the New Zealand Herald. He has also worked for a range of newspapers and magazines here and overseas. His journalism has been recognised in New Zealand and Australia at the Qantas Media Awards and the Citigroup Awards. Earlier in his career he was selected for a Fulbright Journalism Programme that led to work on US newspapers and a research project on the impact of the Internet on newspapers. He was co-organiser of Fusion, the artists' exchange project between New Zealand Chinese and Hong Kong artists that was exhibited in the New Gallery Auckland and the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1996.

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David Larsen - Phone Home Wellington

David Larsen's only attempt at fiction was a dark political satire which escaped into the wild and became the Bush administration. Vowing to keep the world safe from all future misapplications of creativity, he became a book and film critic. He edits Booknotes, the journal of the New Zealand Book Council, and educates his children at home, because you can't trust schools to tell people about the apostrophe these days. There is no truth to the rumour that he is licensed to kill.

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Simon Prast - Off stage

Simon Prast graduated from Theatre Corporate Drama School in 1984. He went on to perform at the Mercury and Downstage Theatres. His television and film appearances include Gloss, Shortland Street, Hercules, Erebus, When Love Comes and The Sinking Of The Rainbow Warrior. Simon was Auckland Theatre Company's (ATC) founding director from 1992 - 2003. During his tenure, he produced and / or directed over 60 main bill productions including The Graduate, Hair, Death of a Salesman, Haruru Mai and 12 Angry Men (voted 'Production of the Decade' by ATC subscribers). He was headhunted to salvage the inaugural Auckland Festival, AK03, later voted 'Event of the Year' in the 2003 Metro Readers Poll. The same poll voted Simon 'Auckland Man of the Year', an acclaim he shared with then-mayor John Banks! He now helms TWA, one of New Zealand's largest talent agencies, proudly based in Waitakere City.

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Ngahuia Te Awekotuku - Mau Moko

Ngahuia Te Awekotuku

Ngahuia Te Awekotuku has been a cultural activist, dreamer, and social commentator for many decades. She also writes. Raised in a traditional Maori village flirting with tourism, she grew up in a family of storytellers, weavers, singers and tour guides. She has produced two collections of fiction, Tahuri - Stories (1992) and Ruahine - Mythic Women (2003), a monograph He Tikanga Whakaaro - Research Ethics in the Maori Community (1991) and Mana Wahine Maori - selected writings on Maori women's art, culture and politics (1991). Her creative writing and scholarly works appear in many international anthologies and collections. Her lifelong obsession is Ta Moko - traditional Maori tattoo, the subject of her latest book, Mau Moko - the World of Maori Tattoo, (2007) which she researched with Waimarie Nikora, Mohi Rua and Rolinda Karapu. She is currently chair of Te Waka Toi, the Maori Arts Board of Creative New Zealand.

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Bob Harvey - Curmudgeon

Bob Harvey is long-time mayor of Waitakere City. He is the author of six books including Untamed Coast and Rolling Thunder. Both were Montana Book Award finalists. Rolling Thunder won the Environment award. He is working on an upcoming book on the history of the Karekare and Whatipu coastline; The Iron Bound Coast, and also a history of the Badham family and the grand boarding houses of the West Coast before 1940.

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Nick Bollinger - Homegrown

Nick Bollinger was born in Wellington in 1958. His life was changed at the age of five when his cousins played him the Beatles' 'Twist & Shout'. At 11 he published a rock journal in the guise of a school magazine. When he was seventeen he began playing bass with the Windy City Strugglers. He has written about music in numerous publications including a regular column in the New Zealand Listener. He presents and produces the weekly music review programme The Sampler for National Radio. His first book, How To Listen To Pop Music, was published in 2004. He is currently working on a second book, titled 100 Essential New Zealand Albums.

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Michelle Leggott - Poetry off the page

Michelle Leggott

Michele Leggott has published six books of poetry, including Milk & Honey (2005, 2006) and Journey to Portugal (2007). She is co-editor of Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960-1975 (2000) with Alan Brunton and Murray Edmond, and editor of Robin Hyde's long poem The Book of Nadath (1999) and Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde (2003). A major project since 2001 has been the development of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of Auckland where she is an Associate Professor of English. She was recently appointed inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2007-09.

See also www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/leggott/index.asp.

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Helen Sword - Poetry off the page

Helen Sword is a teacher, scholar, visual artist (jeweller and mosaicist) and cyberpoet. She teaches literary studies and higher education pedagogy at the University of Auckland and has published widely on modernist literature and culture, digital poetics, educational development and academic writing. Together with Michele Leggott, she co-convenes 'Poetry off the Page', an award-winning undergraduate English course in which students read, write, chalk, record, perform, analyse, digitise, animate and otherwise engage with a wide range of poetic and critical texts.

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Laurence Fearnley - An unlikely love story

Laurence Fearnley has published six novels. Her short stories have been published in various anthologies and journals such as Landfall and Sport as well as broadcast on National Radio. Her second novel, Room, was short listed for the Montana Book Awards in 2001 and Edwin and Matilda was runner-up in the 2008 Montana Book Awards. Based in Dunedin, she was awarded the 2004 Artists to the Antarctica fellowship, the 2006 Island of Residencies fellowship in Tasmania and the 2007 Robert Burns fellowship at the University of Otago. Mother's Day - the final book in her Southern Trilogy will be published by Penguin in 2009. Laurence is now working on a travel memoir about camping and tents.

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Geoff Walker - An unlikely love story

Geoff Walker

Geoff Walker is publishing director of Penguin New Zealand and is one of the country's most experienced publishers. At Penguin he has published many of New Zealand's leading authors, including Michael King, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Maurice Gee, Anne Salmond and Lloyd Jones. Geoff specialises in history, biography and fiction, although Penguin New Zealand publishes across a very broad subject range. His books have won many literary awards, including Montana awards on a number of occasions. He is a former newspaper and television journalist. Geoff was recently awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for services to New Zealand literature.

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Peter Hawes - Images of Dignity 

Images of Dignity Peter Hawes: Born Westport, spent youth in Bradford, Eng, while my father played pro rugby league. Went to Canty Uni, failed for two years until father said if I failed again he'd buy me a corner dairy; never failed again. Went OE and in Spain wrote a novel which was fleetingly famous until it was found to be another boring historical novel and not the rumoured anti-Franco treatise. Got into telly on return to NZ. Got fired for telling lies on the News but by then was writing for A Week Of It and then had my own show. Fired again in mid-eighties, wrote novels for a living, which meant living with rich women. Latest of them Royce Royce the People's Choice is to be a movie. A play about my father's defection to league from union, and the consequences, is on at Centrepoint right now and goes to the Court in Chch next March; it's called The Gods of Warm Beer and has been a real success. I'm famous again!

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Pauline Burgwin - Images of dignity

One of Barry Barclay's six siblings, Pauline Burgwin was born and educated in Masterton. She moved to Australia in 1976, to live with her sister Rene. There she gained a degree in early childhood education, married and raised two children. Pauline returned to New Zealand with her second husband in Nov 2006. From that time until Barry's death, she has been involved with his thinking, recent projects and at his invitation began the cataloguing of his work. Pauline also became more closely involved in his plans for the future. Together, they had begun their connection to iwi. Pauline comes to share insights into the son, brother, father, uncle and grandfather that Barry was.

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Stephen McCurdy - From distant villages

Nina Nola has dedicated her academic career to exploring multicultural literature in New Zealand. Her interest in how the migrant voice is created in our literature comes from her Dalmatian ancestry: the daughter and granddaughter of 'Yugoslav' migrants, she grew up questioning her family's sense of identity in the Dally enclave of Henderson. Her doctoral thesis 'My Two Countries Firmly Under My Feet' (2000) which focuses on Dalmatian New Zealand writer Amelia Batistich has led to many speaking engagements internationally. Currently Nina co-ordinates and teaches English for Foundation studies at the University of Auckland; she also enjoys teaching postgraduate students in Comparative Literature and continuing with her research.

See details of the prorgamme session.