Readers' and Writers' Art Festival Comes to Tauranga

 

 

An exciting line-up for the Literary Programme for this year’s Tauranga Arts Festival includes three award-winning international authors making their only New Zealand appearances at the festival.

 

Christina Lamb OBE has been covering Afghanistan for British newspapers for more than 25 years. Following on from her best-selling 2002 book, The Sewing Circles of Heart, Lamb has this year published Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World, a personal account of the longest war ever fought by the US, and one of the longest fought by the UK. How did a group of religious students and farmers defeat the might of NATO, with 48 countries and 140,000 troops on the ground? And what does instability in landlocked Afghanistan mean for the region and the world? Lamb appears twice on Saturday, October 24 and once on Sunday, October 25.

Melbourne novelist Steven Carroll last year co-won the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Literature for A World of Other People which is set the London of 1941 and inspired by one of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets poems. Carroll is the author of nine novels, including The Time We Have Taken, which won both the Commonwealth Writers’ Regional Prize and the Miles Franklin Award, and Spirit of Progress. His novel about the 1960 West Indies cricket team tour of Australia, The Gift of Speed, is being reprinted in time for the festival. Carroll writes in longhand, 1000 words every day, usually in the shed at his home. He often listens to Beethoven while working. He appears once each on Saturday, October 31 and Sunday, November 1.

Phil Jarratt rode his first wave aged 9 and published his first article about surfing in 1968, aged 17. Since then he has edited Tracks magazine and the Australia edition of Surfer’s Journal, been named among Australia’s 50 most influential surfers, worked for Quiksilver, and founded the Noosa Festival of Surfing, the world’s largest surf carnival. His books include That Summer at Boomerang (2014), the story of Hawaiian surfer Duke Kahanamoku’s visit to Australia on the eve of World War 1 and the best-selling Mr Sunset (surf legend Jeff Hakman) which was made into a film, while Bali: Heaven and Hell (2014) is a history of the island interwoven with personal memoir. Jarratt appears once on Saturday, October 24 and twice on Sunday, October 25. He will also introduce the free, outdoor screening of the 1972 surf movie classic Morning of the Earth at a Mount Maunganui reserve on October 24.

 

New Zealand authors in the line-up are Mandy Hager, Nicky Hager, Stephanie Johnson, Debra Daley, Tracey Barnett, Riley Elliott, Harry Ricketts, Damien Fenton, Bryan Gould and Joseph Romanos. Victoria University’s printer-in-residence Sydney Shep is leading a Zine Craft workshop on October 31 and speaking the next day. Moderators include Wallace Chapman, Toby Manhire, Stephen Stratford and Tony Wall.

Full details of the programme, which for the first time includes day passes, are available at www.taurangafestival.co.nz