25 Jul 2012
The 17th annual festival includes some of New Zealand’s finest poets, novelists, biographers, historians and thinkers.
Expect serious discourse, tantalising readings and insights into the life and art of our much-loved authors, leavened with the absurd and the entertaining. ALWAYS ALMOST: NEVER QUITE succinctly sums up the Auckland's Going West weekend; wide-ranging, quirky, unexpected, intimate, challenging.
The Books and Writers weekend takes place on 14-16 September 2012. Confirmed writers are: Mirranda Burton, Sacha de Bazin, Mary Edmond-Paul, Marianne Elliott, Jacqueline Fahey, Paula Green, Tina Grenville, David Howard, Stephanie Johnson, Sid Marsh, Kirstine Moffat, Emily Perkins, Nalini Singh, Monty Soutar, CK Stead, Paul Thomas, Ian Wedde, Peter Wells, Lani Wendt Young and Tim Wilson. The writers will be chaired by a stellar selection of authoritative ‘experts’.
As a nod to lyricists, on Saturday evening 15 September, Chris Bourke will chair a session with Dave Dobbyn ‘The Song Goes On’ (and maybe sing a song), then Rick Bryant and The Windy City Strugglers take to the stage to perform ‘Snow on the Desert Road’.
Programme Director and GW Festival founder Murray Gray took a walk down memory lane, “The Going West Festival archive has been my area of research for the last few weeks. We have an amazing collection of all our programmes and promotional material since the first Going West in 1996 and a complete audio record of every session we presented over those sixteen years. Some of our most distinguished writers are recorded and sadly many of them have since died - Alister and Meg Campbell, Allen Curnow, JC Sturm, Margaret Mahy and Michael King - but they can still be heard at their peak, reading their work or talking about life and literature. The Waitakere Central Library will display this ephemera and the sound recordings throughout August so people can have the opportunity to hear these wonderful gems from the past and be inspired to come West for a great - and greatly diverse programme in the Books & Writers Weekend in September.”
For details on all events in The Going West Festival Books and Writers Festival 2012 visit the website at www.goingwest.co.nz.
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