Are you managing to keep up? Exhausting isn’t it? – and, possibly like you, I’m only following events from the comfort of my armchair here in Christchurch. We love that you love what we’re doing – thanks for all your feedback, some of which I’ve singled out below.

Today sees one of the best line-ups at the festival, but a few of our highlights are:

  • Addicted to the dark – Donna has this on her must-see list. It brings together Duncan Sarkies, Luke Davies and Heather O’Neill with Festival creative director Stephanie Johnson chairing the session. “Like any good drug, dark literature makes you laugh and cry, makes you fly and pulls you down.” Event details
  • Joyce is looking forward to An hour with John Burnside, who she says is one of Scotland’s finest poets and novelists, and who recently published his first volume of memoirs A lie about my father. As well as attending the session, Joyce will also interview Burnside today. “We’re from the same part of the world,” says Joyce, “so I’m keen to catch up with his news and views on the Scottish literary scene, plus discuss his latest novel Glister.” Event details
  • Aucklandness – the team have instructions to go this session and try to understand what it all means, as Stephanie Johnson, Derek Hansen and Paula Morris discuss their love for Auckland through their writing, with chair Paula Green. Event details
  • Then, to make our Garden City folk feel more at home, Lytteltonian Joe Bennett will ask Where do underpants come from? Here are some helpful links if you don’t know where Lyttelton is or where underpants come from. Event details.

As if that wasn’t enough for our loquacious litter of librarians today, they’re also planning to interview Thomas Kohnstamm, Karlo Mila and Junot Diaz, among others. We’ll have the transcripts here for you soon, but in the meantime, have you read our festival interviews with Tessa Duder, Sarah Hall and Mo Hayder? And don’t forget our festival webpage is a useful one-stop shop for everything about the Festival.

So, back to your feedback. It’s been great to receive all your comments, both via the blog and sent directly to us. Here are a few we’d like to share with you:

mingle76 says of Wednesday’s Daily Festival Wrap: “you all sound great on ‘tape’. I really enjoyed the conversation between the three of you. And very impressed that Joyce’s first interview with Mo Hayder went v. well – am very envious that you got to meet Mo, and are now ‘part of the family’ *grin*.”

I.T. Commentator Paul Reynolds heads a post to his blog “Christchurch comes to Auckland for the Writers Festival” and says of us “I reckon they are going to be the media stars of the event… sounds like best library practice to me.”

Festival Publicist Angela Radford says “You guys are too much! Thank you very much. Richard is an absolute trooper.”

NZ Book Month website says of our festival blogging “an amazing up-to-the-minute reportage of events as they happen!”

OK, back to being media stars… ;)