THE STARS CAME OUT TO PLAY - AND READ AND TALK

Auckland Writers & Readers Festival 2009

New Zealand Listener Opening Night

An interesting collection of authors were on stage in Auckland's Aotea Centre last evening for the gala opening event of this year's Festival attracting a happy crowd of around 1200.

The heavyweight member of the group, the revered and internationally acclaimed Australian author David Malouf,(pic right by Penny Stephens), was accompanied by four others all in the early stages of promising careers with a couple of widely praised books apiece - Monica Ali, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (pic left ), Tash Aw and Christos Tsiolkas.

There is a widespread curiosity and interest by festival-goers about writers reading their own works. Not all do it well although last night's performers were okay without being anything special. Pehaps the most impressive was the gracious US-based Nigerian writer on her second visit to Auckland who read beautifully and gently from her new short story collection.

For me though the more interesting part of the hour and a half session was the panel discussion ably led by Mark Sainsbury.

Personally I think five on stage at once is two or three too many and I am looking forward eagerly to a number of the Hour With events over the next few days. I find these sessions far more interesting and satisfying.

In fact there was one session immediately prior to the NZ Listener Opening Night event and it was a cracker - An Hour With Hendrik Hertzberg.

Hertzberg is an enormously respected senior writer with The New Yorker specialising in politics. Early in his career, 1979-81, he landed a job as chief speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter after which he was editor for The New Republic before moving to The New Yorker in 1992.

Although chair Jon Johansson did an excellent job in interviewing Hertzberg, and is clearly extremely well informed on US politics, he should have been more aware that we had come to listen to the guest not the chair. That criticism aside this was an excellent session with Hertzberg proving to be an intelligent, articulate, and observant speaker who provided a number of fascinating insights into various US presidencies, (all with an unashamed Democrat bias), as well as making a number of interesting comments about the need for US electoral reform particularly around proportional representation and the eleboarte and flawed electoral college system of voting for the presidency.