NZ Festival - IT'S TIME FOR THE WRITERS

it's time for the writers

Hi there, Featuring over 100 of the smartest, most eloquent and entertaining people from home and abroad in more than 50 events, the 2016 New Zealand Festival Writers Week is the ultimate conversation starter – and it begins this evening. Multi-talented author, filmmaker and artist Miranda July, short-story and non-fiction writer Etgar Keret, The Toast's and Slate's Mallory Ortberg (named one of the "new guard" of media-makers unders 30 by Forbes magazine) and novelist and journalist Andrew O'Hagan are among the leading writers and thinkers in Wellington and region until Sunday 13 March. Along with solo sessions with these and other authors such as novelists Muriel Barbery and Patrick Gale, popular-history writer Simon Winchester, fantasy writer Jasper Fforde, children's writers Sally Gardner, Cornelia Funke and Joy Cowley, BBC science presenter Adam Rutherford, graphic novelist Mariko Tamaki, novelist and memoirist Robert Dessaix and slam poet Anis Mojgani, there'll be plenty of the inspired panel combinations and topics Writers Week regulars love so much. As the Fiji cyclone highlighted, discussing our response to natural disasters has never been more vital, and that is what Winchester, author of Pacific: The Ocean of the the Future, will be doing with fellow panellists in Weathering Catastrophe. Among other panels are ones looking at questions of leadership, the new age of genomics, what sets elite athletes apart from the rest of us and whether those skills can apply to any endeavour, the extent to which adults underestimate what children want to read about, and the quality of public debate in New Zealand. Writers Week begins at 6pm this evening when bestselling British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh is in conversation with RNZ National's Kim Hill. Be sure to join the conversation. Writers Week is supported by The Lion Foundation, Victoria University of Wellington, Creative New Zealand and QT Museum Wellington.

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