Opening remarks of Anne O’Brien, Director of the Auckland Writers Festival which is celebrating its fifteenth year

A particular welcome to the Minister for Arts Culture and Heritage the Hon Maggie Barry, to the Leader of the Opposition Andrew Little, MPs Nikki Kaye and Jacinda Ardern, to Auckland Councillors and Local Board Members, to writers from here and beyond, and to you our loyal and engaged audience. 

The Festival doesn’t happen without a raft of support and I want to take a moment to acknowledge our major partners who believe in our cause and demonstrate that in tangible ways:

- Gold Partners the New Zealand Listener who help us present this Gala Night, the University of Auckland, the Freemasons Foundation – now supporting our two days schools programme for 4,500 students across the upper North Island - and ATEED

- core funders Creative New Zealand, the ASB Community Trust and the Lion Foundation

- Silver Partners Summerset, The Langham Auckland, and the NZ Herald

- our other partners, publishers, suppliers

- And our individual patron champions

Thank you all!

We’re a small team and I pay tribute to the dedication and hard work of my colleagues and our Board who bring this amazing Festival to life each year.

In the spirit of a writers’ festival, I want to briefly share a couple of quotes with you:  Last week the lovely people at online cultural hub Gather and Hunt said this of the Auckland Writers Festival:

If you like books or people or life. If you often find yourself thinking about what it is to be alive, or better, thinking about thinking, this festival is a dream come true.

It struck me not only because it so beautifully captures the spirit of the event – and delivers the perfect pitch for our next funding application – thank you

But it also resonates with another eloquent piece of recent writing which I’ve had my mind lately, from the wonderful neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks who, as some of you may know, is terminally ill.  He recently wrote:

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Sacks’ expression of gratitude moves and inspires me.  There is something fundamental and humane about the engagement with our world, our inner selves and with each other that books bring us.  Without that engagement …. what are we?

He goes on to say:

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

I pay tribute to him and to all writers and to their generosity of spirit.

Life IS an adventure ... it’s not always easy, it’s occasionally incomprehensible … but as thinking animals, as Oliver Sacks says,  in our search for meaning and vibrancy the world of letters and thought can be both our delight and our consolation.

And in an age of noise, what a writers’ festival delivers is personal encounter as a gateway to the world we know and the one beyond our own experience.  With all of that in mind I urge you to make the very most of the weekend about to unfold within these walls… your end of weekend exhaustion mitigated entirely we hope by the really fabulous company you will have from the stage over the next three days.