The unofficial NBR guide to the Auckland Writers' Festival

You don’t have to have a taste for modern literature or poetry to be attracted to this year’s Auckland Writers’ Festival.

The world's biggest foreign policy issue will be examined, while famous feminists and a top British dramatist are attending.

British philosopher Julian Baggini is chairing a current affairs panel with four guests giving their views on the Syrian conflict and the resulting humantiarian migration crisis.

They are Israeli strategic consultant Yossi Alpher, Palestinian conservation architect Suad Amiry, Medecins Sans Frontieres co-founder Jean-Christophe Rufin and Middle East expert Emma Sky.

Another conflict, the 25-year civil war in Sri Lanka, is the subject of a session by Indian scholar Samanth Subramanian, whose forensic account, This Divided Island, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2015.

The witty and urbane Subramanian, who contributes to The New Yorker, brings his journalistic rigour to bear on the story of a country recently visited by Prime Minister John Key.

English dramatist, screenwriter and director Sir David Hare (TV’s superb The Worricker Trilogy) will leads a limited-entry conversation on the art of playwriting and aimed at practitioners of the craft.

Would-be novelists will also learn more from American writer Jane Smiley’s session, “13 Ways of Looking at the Novel,” a behind-the-scenes examination through 100 novels.

This workshop by the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning of A Thousand Acres, will investigate questions of plot and character, with participants invited to bring along a copy of their favourite novel to incorporate into the discussion.

Focus on feminism
Married couple Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit) and Susie Orbach (Fat Is A Feminist Issue) will discuss madness and creativity. Winterson will draw on her personal experiences as a novelist, while psychotherapist Orbach draws on her clinical practice, to offer a primer of sorts on being creative.

Still on feminism, one of its most famous practitioners, author-publisher-activist Gloria Steinem – founder of MS magazine – will make her first appearance in New Zealand at the age of 81.

One of her earliest articles, “A Bunny’s Tale,” was based on her own experiences as a Playboy bunny.

Her activism has included protest against the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa, the Gulf War and most recently the campaign for disarmament in Korea.

She has just published a memoir, My Life on the Road.

Local highlights include criminology professor John Pratt, author of The Prison Diary of AC Barrington: Dissent and Conformity in Wartime New Zealand, talking about conscientious objection and the country’s "punitive" record of incarceration.

Auckland academic Roger Horrock will discuss his new book, Zizz: The Life and Art of Len Lye. Horrocks worked as an assistant to Lye in New York in the last year of the artist’s life

The 2016 Auckland Writers Festival runs from May 10-15. More information is at www.writersfestival.co.nz

Tune into NBR Radio’s Sunday Business with Andrew Patterson on Sunday morning, for analysis and feature-length interviews.