DON'T MISS THIS WEEKS NZ LISTENER

*Arts & Books Editor Guy Somerset talks to the star of the Christchurch Writers Festival, Kate Mosse. She's quite a gal!

*Diana Wichtel visits Sam Hunt on the occasion of publication of his first book of poems in 10 years. Great pics by Jane Ussher.

*Geoff Chapple reviews Brian Turner's latest Into the Wider World:A Back Country Miscellany.

*And there are five further pages of book reviews .

Kate Mosse is the author of best-selling novels Labyrinth and Sepulchre and co-founder and honorary director of the Orange Prize.

Here is the beginning of Somereset's interview:

The fly in the ointment on this one seems to have been writer and journalist Tim Lott and his piece in the Sunday Telegraph.

These things go in cycles. We had a lot of this when we were setting up the prize, and it was a bit odd to have an identical sort of piece 13 years on with no development and no taking account of what the prize has achieved. It’s one of those things, where one of the big things about the Orange Prize, apart from celebrating fantastic international fiction by women, is to have a debate about writing and gender and reading, who sells what and who buys what. Oddly, a piece like that, which got a lot of people talking, is really helpful for any book prize, because the point of book prizes is to promote books to readers. It’s as simple as that. The column-inches given to the Orange Prize this year have been as much as everything given to the Man Booker Prize and Costa Book Awards put together. The sales of the books reflect that in a way.

Do men and women read and write differently?

I think that’s the one thing I feel no clearer about 13 years on than when we first started the prize. I do think there’s an issue with men and women reading. When we did a survey of 4000 readers in, I think it was, 2002, what came out was that women who were interested in literary fiction particularly were not swayed by either the gender of the author or the gender of the lead character or characters. Many men were more influenced by those things, and often assumed that if a book was by a woman and had female lead characters, it was intended for women readers. But when we stripped that back further, it wasn’t even really the text, it was how certain books were jacketed.

Read the full piece at The Listener online. Or even better get yourself a copy of NZ's leading weekly magazine and read all the book-related articles at your leisure.

And for details of Kate Mosse's appearances & the rest of the star-studded lineup of authors in Christchurch link here to The Press Christchurch Writers Festival. 4-7 September 2008.