Sun 2 August One-Day Short Story Competition

The Christchurch Art Gallery is currently promoting a short story competition. It will be judged by Kate De Goldi, Gavin Bishop and Sally Blundell and is open to two age-groups.

Age groups
13–17yrs: 1500 words max.
First prize $250 and publication of short story in The Press.

18+yrs: 1500 words max.
First prize $750, publication of short story in The Press, one night at the Classic Villa, dinner for two at the Curator’s House and tickets for the Court Theatre.

9.30am: Register at the Gallery and get an information pack, which includes four of the twelve story triggers from within the Cultural Precinct to get your story started.

4.30pm: Entries handed in (late entries will not be accepted).

Registration Pack

On the day of the competition all entrants will receive a pack containing:

• a registration form
• a blank CD on which to burn your entry
• a list of 12 story triggers from within the Cultural Precinct. At least four must appear in your story
• a unique registration number.

Save yourself time on the day by pre-registering. Email canterburynzsa@gmail.com with your name and category. You can then simply pick up your pack from the Gallery on the day.

Find out more:  Short story competition: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu.

 

Crocus Hour or Ladies, A Plate?

Voting in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards is one of my favourite civic duties, but this year, my mouse is hovering between two boxes :

The Crocus Hour by Charlotte Randall
A treasure box of ex-pat angst, taut family relationships and a mystery. 

Ladies A Plate:Traditional Home Baking by Alexa Johnston

Any recipe book that has the recipes that I have failed to pry out of my Mother’s hands must be a potential award winner for me, and the rich historical detail makes this the Te Papa of cookbooks.  

My vote is wavering between the domestic arts and the literary arts; my heart vs.  my stomach.

 

Final festival wrap-up

After an intense, enjoyable, fast-paced last day of the festival fever, we present our last audio wrap up. We have been proud to represent the library and hope you have enjoyed the coverage, which we have tried to make entertaining and informative.

The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize added so much to the festival. It brought variations of eloquence to our ears and eyes from around the world, and impressing all the audiences, I am certain, with the breadth and depth of the all to uncommon wealth of writers which we were lucky enough to see.

Our final report is a touch under 14 minutes long.

Keep an eye on the blog for more interviews with Commonwealth Writers’ prize best book winner Christos Tsiolkas, Rod Oram, Don McGlashan, and for a slightly different take, Patricia Kay, one of the volunteers who has been with the festival since day one. We also hope to have follow-up interviews with authors in the near future, and more photos will be added to the library flickr soon. If you have questions or comments about any aspect of the festival or the coverage, leave a comment – we would love to hear from you.

Now get thee to a library

 

Not a shy African woman

An hour with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 

Chaired by Paula Morris this session provided another full-house and an insightful look at the issues of interest to this relatively new and exciting author. The thing around your neck, Chimamanda’s first collection of short stories, explores cultural clash and the migrant experience, building on the success of her earlier prize-winning novels Half of a yellow sun and Purple hibiscus

Paula Morris opened her questions by asking Chimamanda whether she was conscious of an African and Nigerian identity while growing up in a middle-class home in Nsukka. Chimamanda answered that she had no real sense of being anything other than Ebu, a Nigerian tribe, and that it was only when she left Nigeria to attend John Hopkins University in the US that she was viewed as African and suddenly expected by her teachers and fellow student to be an authority on all things African. She added that while to some extent she had to accept the label of Nigerian and African writer, she felt uncomfortable representing a whole continent. She also talked of having the authenticity of her first novel Purple hibiscus questioned by a white, male American university professor because her African characters drove cars and weren’t starving!

Spending half her time in the US, Chimamanda believes allows her to look at Nigeria from the outside, making her clearer eyed. This sentiment was also echoed in a later session by Tash Aw who also finds his voluntary exile in London affords him more clarity in analysing his home country of Malaysia. But Nigeria was she said “where her heart is” and while her country often infuriates her she belongs there and “loves it very deeply”.

Chimamanda was outed as an Enid Blyton fan, she joked she was reading the Famous Five back in her hotel room, and that her teenage years were spent in the quest for lashings of ginger beer. The fact she had never actually managed to taste ginger beer was remedied by one of the ARWF crew who brought her a Bundaberg, how topping! When questions were opened to the floor one gentleman complimented her on her modest demeanour while waiting to come on stage and called her a traditional “shy African woman”, a compliment Chimamanda was not having a bar of. Talented, beautiful, intelligent and not shy, an hour with Chimamanda was a real delight.

 

Tsiolkas: Libraries saved my life

Christos Tsiolkas moments after winning best book, Commonwealth Writers' Prize

We’re asking all writers we interview At the Auckland festival about libraries and what they mean to them. When I put the question to Commonwealth Writers’ Prize best book winner Christos Tsiolkas, he said that wandering the shelves at libraries saved his life.

“In the sense that, it was through the public libraries that …

His eyes look down as the sentence trails away, but he opens up his life to explain:

“In my early adolescence I was not a very happy young man, dealing with issues of sexuality, dislocation – I’d gone from a heavily migrant school to a quite Anglo, what we call skip in Australia, school. I felt quite displaced.

“I used to escape both to the library at school, but also to the public library near my home and just wander the shelves. I picked up everything. I spent hours in the film section and got introduced to the writings of Pauline Kael, the writings of Jim Agee – and then I would go and discover literature.

“That’s one of the things about the space of a library. You can go and do that wandering. There’s something about the solidity of the space and the communality of the space is really important to me.

Tsiolkas also sees the value of libraries as a place for community.

“I love that you see the young students – a lot of them are Muslims, because it’s a heavily Arab area where I live, but they may be Vietnamese, the may be Anglo, they may be Greek . They’re using the computers and you realise not every home has that access that a lot of us take for granted.

“You see old men reading the newspapers in their community language, you see young kids wandering the shelves like I did and picking up ideas and picking up new discoveries – that’s exciting.”

Even in the digital age, libraries have an important role, he says.

“You can do that kind of searching on the internet, but you can’t do it in that communal way that the public library represents. In an incredibly globalised, rationalised world it’s a kind of a small miracle that we hold on to them. It’s important that we do.”

A full interview with Christos Tsiolkas will be published in the near future. In the meantime, tell us if libraries have saved your life, and how, by posting a comment )

 

Saturday’s Festival wrap-up

We recorded this wrap-up at the Aotea Centre where the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize was announced.

We had two very special guests, Vanda Symon, a Dunedin crime writer, and Christos Tsiolkas, who had just been named winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. After sterling work blogging all day, Robyn was kicking her heels up at The Pussy Cat Dolls and Lady Gaga concert.

Understandably this post is a little longer, approximately 17 minutes, but we think you’ll find its worthwhile hearing our guests, who take us on quite a wide-ranging discussion.

We also hope to have some more images on flickr soon – and please keep your comments coming in.

And while we had an absolute blast last night, the coverage continuees today with a full day of sessions:

• Stevan Eldred-Grigg makes his appearance and Moata will be there
• Mohammad Hanif – who won best first book at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize last night – will read
• Other international guests Monica Ali and Judith Thurman are on stage
• Joanne Drayton will talk about Ngaio Marsh
• A panel will gaze into the next 100 years
• Poetry readings, songwriting and more!

 

Commonwealth Writers’ Prize winners are:

Best First Book: Mohammad Hanif - A case of exploding mangoes.

Hanif paid thanks to Jill Rawnsley, festival director. Hanif said his son even stopped playing PSP for a minute!

Dedicated award to Dept of Immigration and Customs – he was delayed by them for two hours. Apparently they wouldn’t let his son (or someone in the group) go to the toilet.

He ended his speech by saying: Thank you very much I’ll now go and pee!

Best Book: Christos Tsiolkas The Slap.

He said: Great pride to be in the company of other fantastic and brilliant writers and comrades and generous people. There is no competition in art. I can’t believe I’m gonna meet the Queen and my mum said I have to ask for the Parthenon marbles back.

Vanda Symon is our guest on the wrap up tonight – to be recorded at the Aotea Centre.

 

Passageways

Passageways with Ann Thwaite and Joanna Woods chaired by Hamish Keith

My goodness that Hamish Keith gets about! He seems to be a constant on the New Zealand literary festival circuit and I think I know why, famous though he is for courting controversy, today with wonderful wit and charm he facilitated an interesting and generous conversation between biographers Anne Thwaite and Joanna Woods.

Hamish started the ball rolling by sharing the idea of the travelling gene; that everyone however long they’ve been in New Zealand has come from somewhere else. He also mooted the idea that early migrants to New Zealand rather than flying the flag for Great Britain were keen to establish an identity for their new home as something separate and other. He added that by the 1930’s and 40’s England had become re-established as home, reinforced through the education system and government, and that many New Zealanders  had a “fantasy past and uncertain present”. This fantasy past being created both Joanna Woods and Hamish Keith felt by nationalist writers of the period like Curnow and Fairburn, men with a vested interest in bashing the cultural achievements of the past.

Joanna Woods, author of Facing the music a biography of Charles Baeyertz, spoke compellingly about New Zealand’s vibrant cultural and literary scene during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She cited a galaxy of international stars that performed in New Zealand and a host of homegrown talent that enlivened the lives of early New Zealanders. Baeyertz founded The Triad a cultural magazine which stayed in print for over 50 years and provided her with a rich source of information about New Zealand’s early cultural creations.

Ann Thwaite winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Biography in 1990 shared her recently published family history Passageways.  She said it took her 40 years after his death before she could face opening the suitcases containing her Father’s papers and acknowledged that delving into the past was not always a joyful process and that “a photograph could be too sad to frame”. She talked about the joy of getting to know her parents as young people through their letters and diaries and read a charming passage from her Mother’s notebook detailing the appropraite behaviours that a young lady should model.

While the authors themselves seemed to find some difficulty in aligning their particular publications with the programme’s uniting theme of migration this was nonetheless an interesting session tackling in somewhat plummy tones issues of identity and culture.

 

Okay, breathe deeply …

As a person who writes for a living, going to the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival is a dream assignment for me. There’s the chance for lots of interviews, catching up with legends like Bookman Beattie, and all the fun of the events themselves, and writing, writing all the time.

However, I have a gnawing fear – a fear born of tired fingers trying to go too fast. You see, I often mis-type festival as “festical”. I don’t know what a festical is, but I hope I don’t get kicked there anytime soon. I try to take a deep breath before I type the word, slow down and avoid the howler… but you never know.

The other reason I’m taking a deep breath is the scope of this year’s event. It’s billed as: Politics. Fiction. Economics. Science. Current Affairs. Find out what an Earth is going on. There are some compelling sessions, with authors who write a broad range material – from detailed comment and analysis, to short stories and poetry.

I’m really looking forward to seeing Stefan Aust. He’s a former editor of Der Spiegel, who’s spent most of his working life covering the world of espionage and terrorism. His book, The Baader-Meinhof complex, has been hard to put down, and has recently been made into a movie.

New Yorker financial columnist and author James Surowiecki and Australian author Christos Tsiolkas also look like intersting fare, and Richard Dawkins will no doubt stir the grey matter up. Then there’s all the fantastic Kiwi writers …

What a line-up – this festival is going to be very memorable! Please send your comments and questions in as we go – we’d love to hear from you. And on that note, what’s your favourite howler typo?

 

Commonwealth Writers Prize Regional winners announced

Will this win? Don't ask me, I'm bound to be wrong.

It just goes to show that I’m nothing if not a really rubbish literary pundit. When the Commonwealth Writers Prize regional shortlists were announced I put my money on Aravind Adiga to at least make it through to the semis. Twas not to be however and I am left to reflect upon the fact that projecting popularity is not a strong suit of mine (when I first heard about The Piano I thought it sounded like the kind of movie that people would stay away from in droves – so I have a history of getting this sort of thing wrong).

So perhaps I should just stick to facts, just the facts (ma’am) and tell you that a single New Zealand book has made it through to the final “round” of judging in the awards. The year of the Shanghai Shark by Mo Zhi Hong will compete with the following titles in the “Best First Book” category -

• A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif (Pakistan)
• Reading by Lightning by Joan Thomas (Canada)
• Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan (Nigeria)

A full list of the regional winners in can be viewed on the official website. The winner will be announced at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival on 16 May.