Warm weather tempers growth in Auckland Writers Festival

An unseasonally warm autumn may have pushed booklovers outdoors if attendances at the weekend’s Auckland Writers Festival are any indication.

Some 63,000 seats were filled at the country’s largest literary event but this was only slightly up on last year after three years of rapid growth.

Attendances rocketed 55% in 2014 and rose 17% in 2015 to more than 62,000.

Now in its 15th year, it featured more than 150 novelists, playwrights, songwriters, scientists, historians, children’s writers, critics, editors, illustrators and poets.

The headline star was undoubtedly US feminist Gloria Steinem, who had one of the sellout audiences on Saturday night. She also featured in a political panel discussion on the state of America with a cosmologist, Janna Levin, and novelist Thomas Mallon.

Other internationally recognised writers included TV and stage dramatist Sir David Hare, novelists Jane Smiley, Jeanette Winterson and Hanya Yanagihara, and 2015 Booker Prize winner Marlon James.

The needs of the next generation of readers were met in a separate schools programme sponsored by the Freemasons Foundation. It attracted more than 5000 students attending sessions with 20 writers from the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand.

This was increased from two to three days this year, enabling two dedicated sessions for Years 5 and 6 students, as well as a full additional day for Years 9-13 students.

All students left the programme with a free book of stories published by the festival. In addition, an increased transport subsidy meant more low decile and regional school students to attend while for some it was free. Selected students also taking part in a mentoring programme.

“Fostering a love of reading and books, and a belief in all young people that they, too can write their stories is hugely important to us,” festival director Anne O’Brien says.

The festival kicked off with the presentation of the inaugural $50,000 Acorn Foundation Literary Prize to Australian-domiciled Kiwi novelist Stephen Daisley for Coming Rain, set in Western Australia wheat belt in the 1950s. His first novel, Traitor, won Australia’s top literary prize, the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction.

Vincent O’Sullivan was honoured for his life’s work in writing with a pounamu paper knife created by Coromandel artist Chris Charteris. This year’s Sarah Broom Poetry Prize went to Elizabeth Smither.

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