NEW ZEALAND POST WRITERS & READERS FESTIVAL

Sitting in the audience watching the punters pour into the exceedingly comfortable Embassy theatre one thinks how familiar many of them look.

In fact I do not know them at all - they just look familiar.

They are I suppose a pretty typical literary festival audience. Largely white, widely read, well educated, middle class, and middle aged, more women than men.

Although there are among them some booksellers and publishers and authors, whom I do know, these folk are in the great majority there because they are readers - book buyers and book borrowers. Afterwards they will be out at the Unity Bookhop in the lobby buying the books written by the author to whom they have just been listening.

These are the people that make authorship, book publishing, bookselling and festivals like this possible and I thank them and salute them.