WORDS ON A SMALL ISLAND

FIRST WAIHEKE ISLAND LITERARY FESTIVAL

Last week I had the great good fortune to attend The Waiheke Literary Festival an inspiring festival of books including among the speakers a food writer, dramatist, artist and photographer, along with novelists, children’s writers and poets.
This is the first of what organisers hope will be an annual two day event.

Among those I heard speak were Richard Wolfe who has a string of books to his credit largely in the area of popular culture. He was most entertaining as Chair John Daly-Peoples led him through a series of questions that provided Wolfe with the ooportunity to talk of his professional life, formerly as a museum curator/designer and more latterly as a full-time writer. he now has 31 titles to his credit and he spoke particularly of his two most recent titles, CRIKEY, Random House 2009, and NEW ZEALAND PORTRAITS, Penguin 2008.

Then it was the turn of former art curator/art historian, critic/writer Christopher Johnstone who spoke about his two latest books and how he went about selecting and sourcing the images, writing the text, and how he was influenced by his life in the arts in the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand. Both of these two handsome titles, LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS IN NEW ZEALAND, and THE PAINTED GARDEN, were published by Random House NZ.

So the Festival was off to a good start with these two articulate and interesting writers.

Over a truly superb, long lunch at the wonderful Mudbrick Winery restaurant we were entertained by master playwright Roger Hall (pic right) who answered a series of questions enabling him to ponder on the huge success of his many plays, talking about highlights, generational diffreneces, NZ humour and more besides.

Then it was the turn of Jeremy Hansen and Patrick Reynolds, co-author and photographer of the stunning VILLA published to great acclaim recently by Random House, who took us behind the scenes for a look at the process of selecting the homes featured on the book and some of the interesting experiences they had. VILLA is magnificently designed and crammed with photographs of everything from the original photos of villas in the 1890s and fragments of glorious old wallpaper, from totally untouched interiors to the most innovative additions.

Finally food editor/cookery writer extraordinaire Lauraine Jacobs, just returned from Bali's Ubud Writers & Readers Festival delivered a mouth-watering address on all matters food particularly mentioning the fun experienced as editor of the recently published TREASURY OF NZ BAKING (Random House) with receipes from the best-loved food writers around the country and with royalties going to Breast Cancer Research.

A great day, I almost nodded off on the 35 minuted ferry ride back to Auckland. Next year I hope to be there both days.
There were many other stars on show that evening and the next dayamong them Stanley Palmer, Alex Johnson, Kate de Goldi, Ron Sang, and Selina Tusitala Marsh.
Congratulations to the organisers on a fine first festival.


Left - Richard Wolfe, photo by author/photographer Janet Hunt who also took the photo of Roger Hall above.
And the pic right of artist Stanley Palmer in front of a canvas that features in his latest title, EAST.