The mysterious, the morbid and insights into the deeply personal act of memoir writing are on the agenda for this year’s Queenstown Writers Festival.
Being held at Te Atamira on November 11 and 12, the line-up’s spearheaded by producer and director Dame Gaylene Preston (pictured), who shared her story as a trail-blazing pioneer of New Zealand’s film industry in her recent memoir, Gaylene’s Take.
She’ll discuss her life and works with local filmmaker Holly Wallace and hold a small screenwriting workshop.
Award-winning filmmaker Michael Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue), whose debut novel Better the Blood took the publishing world by storm, is also on the list — he played a key role in having Teina Pora’s wrongful conviction for the 1992 rape and murder of Susan Burdett
overturned.
Former journalist and columnist Megan Nicol Reed channelled her delight in sending up the middle classes, and writing about the absurdity and mundanity of modern parental concerns, into her debut novel One of Those Mothers — her conversation with Queenstown author Jane Bloomfield is pegged to be funny, insightful and irreverent.
Barbara Else, one of NZ’s literary greats whose memoir Laughing at the Dark tells her tale of finding the courage to break free of societal constraints, will speak about writing memoirs at Arrowtown Lifestyle Village, ahead of an on-stage conversation with Nicol Reed.
Speakers are rounded out by Cristina Sanders, whose book Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant reimagined the sinking of one of NZ’s most famous shipwrecks and the lives of 15 survivors on the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands.
She’ll share the stage with Wānaka businessman Bill Day, who spent 35 years and millions of dollars on five unsuccessful attempts to recover the General Grant and its golden treasure.
Tickets for the festival go live on Eventfinda today — earlybird prices apply till October 14.
For more info, see qtwritersfestival.nz, or the Queenstown Writers Festival Facebook page.
