Expect the mysterious and the morbid, as well insights into memoir writing, at the 2023 Queenstown Writers Festival.
For our 2023 programme we've brought together acclaimed writers from across Aotearoa New Zealand to discuss bold ideas and their latest books, on the weekend of November 11 to 12 at Te Atamira in Frankton.
Dame Gaylene Preston headlines the festival. The writer, producer and director of classic films like Ruby and Rata and War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us shared her ground-breaking experiences as a pioneer of the local film industry in her memoir Gaylene’s Take. She will discuss her life and work with Queenstown filmmaker Holly Wallace, and will lead a three-hour screenwriting workshop.
Another expert storyteller, novelist Barbara Else, also had a memoir published recently. In the beautifully crafted Laughing at the Dark, she tells how she found the courage to break free of societal constraints and find her voice. She'll join fellow rebel Megan Nicol Reed in conversation. An experienced editor and literary agent, Barbara will also guide aspiring memoir writers at a talk at Arrowtown Lifestyle Village.
Cristina Sanders reconstructed the story of a famous shipwreck and the lives of the 15 survivors on the subantarctic Auckland Islands in the meticulously researched novel Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant. She will share the stage with Wānaka adventurer Bill Day, who over the last 35 years has made five voyages to the Auckland Islands to try to recover the General Grant and its treasure.
Award-winning filmmaker Michael Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue) took the publishing world by storm with his crime thriller Better the Blood. A writer of wide-reaching ability and a fighter against institutionalised racism and injustice, he played a key role in the Teina Pora’s exoneration after being imprisoned for 21 years for a crime he did not commit. Michael will join Queenstown lawyer Bryony Shackell in a wide-ranging conversation.
Megan Nicol Reed is a former journalist whose newspaper columns never failed to provoke a reaction from readers. She channelled her delight in sending up the middle classes, and writing about the absurdity and mundanity of modern parental concerns, into her début novel One of Those Mothers. She'll speak with Queenstown writer Jane Bloomfield.
In a new event for 2023, we have invited six talented Queenstown writers to share work in a sampler session built around a theme of arrival – physical arrivals and those that happen inwardly.
Tickets are now on sale on Eventfinda. Earlybird prices apply until October 14.
We look forward to seeing you there!