Press Release – Patrick Maher
An interesting story has emerged out of Thailand where an author was trapped in the devastating 2011 Thai floods for five weeks. Patrick Maher, an international school teacher, found himself stuck in his house on a small strip of dry land with his wife … Read more »
WRITERS ON MONDAYS
I Come from Palmerston North: James Brown
This month sees the release of James Brown’s fifth poetry collection, Warm Auditorium. We thought it was time to find out more about the man behind the poems, and tease out the shifts and changes in the work itself. Chair Fergus Barrowman drags the poet away from his desk at Te Papa to consider how work, world and words have cohabited and evolved between the covers of his books, and to give the new poems a hearing.
DATE: Monday 30 July
TIME: 12.15-1.15pm
VENUE: The Marae, Level 4, Te Papa
(please note that no food may be taken on to The Marae)
Writers on Mondays is presented with the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and additional support from Circa Theatre, City Gallery Wellington and the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation at Victoria University.
A joint press release by Public Films and Atuanui Press
July the 23rd, 2012
Last year Tonga’s rugby players impressed World Cup audiences with their skills and flair. Tonga is famous for its athletes, but few New Zealanders know that their closest neighbour also produces many distinguished intellectuals. Saturday the 4th of August will see the launch of a film and a book honouring the late Futa Helu, Tonga’s most important modern thinker and a man with a message very relevant to twenty-first century New Zealand.
Paul Janman’s film Tongan Ark is a portrait of ‘Atenisi, the private university Helu created in a swamp on the edge of Tonga’s capital city Nuku’alofa in the 1960s. Helu believed that European and Polynesian cultures needed to learn and borrow from one another, and the staff of ‘Atenisi put his ideas into practice by offering courses in grand opera and English literature as well as traditional Tongan music and dance. ‘Atenisi is the Tongan word for Athens, and Helu wanted to emulate ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates by promoting reasoned and open debate, even when such debate touched on controversial political issues.
6 AUGUST Bohemian Girl: Terese Svoboda
New York writer Terese Svoboda has a body of work that includes poetry, novels, memoir, translation and over a hundred published short stories. Black Glasses Like Clark Kent is a memoir of her uncle’s chilling experience as a military policeman in occupied Japan, and Weapons Grade uses poetry to interrogate the power of occupation – both political and personal. Svoboda’s latest novel is Bohemian Girl, ‘a cross between True Grit and Huckleberry Finn’. She talks with Mary McCallum.
Date: Monday 6 August
Time: 12.15-1.15pm
Venue: The Marae, Level 4, Te Papa (please note that no food may be taken onto The Marae).
Writers on Mondays is presented with the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and additional support from Circa Theatre, City Gallery Wellington and the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation at Victoria University.
These events are open to the public and free of charge.
Ron Rash visited New Zealand earlier this year as part of Wellington Writers and Readers Week. A friend of mine who attended his sessions spoke of his palpable passion for conveying place in his writing and how place is almost the central ‘character’. For Rash, his ‘place’ is Appalachia in the United States of America. His previous novel, ‘Serena’ was set there, as is this new novel, ‘The Cove’.
Siblings Laurel and Hank Shelton live in ‘the cove’ of the book’s title. A dank and barren place, locals believe it is haunted and treat the disfigured Laurel as a witch. Hank has recently returned as an amputee from World War One. The pair struggle to make something of themselves and their seemingly doomed land against enormous odds. One day, Laurel discovers a mute and injured man in the cove;as he slowly heals, he becomes part of life on the farm and brings much hope to Laurel’s bleak life. Things are not as simple as they seem, however – the stranger possesses a past that has dramatic ramifications on the future of the Sheltons. Read more »
PRESS RELEASE
THE LONGLIST for the 2012 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel, which will be presented at a ceremony at the upcoming The Press Christchurch Writers’ Festival in September, have today been revealed. The award is made for the best crime, mystery, or thriller novel written by a New Zealand citizen or resident, published in New Zealand or overseas during the past year.
A panel of seven local and international judges is currently considering the longlisted titles. This year the judges are from the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and New Zealand. The three finalists for the 2012 Ngaio Marsh Award will be announced in July.
We Are Immortal Launches Today
Friday 27 April
Media release
For immediate release
A limited edition journal showcasing the work of two local artists will launch in Wellington this evening.
We are immortal is the collaboration between photographer Emma Anderson and writer Jenah Shaw, both recent graduates and young artists at the beginning of their careers. The book, which combines three short stories with a series of black and white photography, went to print with funding raised on PledgeMe – New Zealand’s first crowdfunding website.
The launch will be followed by a city-wide poster exhibition displaying imagery from the book. Supported by Phantom Billstickers Ltd, this very public exhibition will run for three weeks from mid-May.
We are immortal will launch at 7pm this evening, Friday 27 April, at Wellington’s The Russian Frost Farmers Gallery. The book will be available for purchase through the project’s website, www.weareimmortal.co.nz, and stockists to be confirmed.
ENDS
My Little Geek Press Release
Educational ABC book keeps parents and kids entertained from Android to Zombie.
Palmerston North, New Zealand – April 17, 2012 – A tech-inspired ABC book for children looks to revolutionise educational books by introducing a fun, geeky twist.
Available from retail stores in a printed version or online for the iPad or iPhone, My Little Geek turns “A for Apple and B for Ball” into “A for Android and B for Binary” with quirky illustrations by Edit Sliacka.
Palmerston North-based parents Andrew and Sarah Spear created the book when they noticed that all their alphabet books were the same.
Read more »
Press Release – 99 to 1
New Book Sheds Light on Rallying Cries of Occupy and 99 Percent Movements, and Suggests What We Can Do About Inequality Published today, 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It, by Chuck Collins, is the first major … Read more »
The weather’s closing in. The air gets heavier and heavier. I bump into Aleksandra Lane on the way to the Embassy. She’s writing in a cafe. ‘Is it going to rain?’ I say. ‘That I can’t tell you,’ she says and we both laugh. Me because she pats the papers on the table in front of her, like they contain every answer except that. Several other small things happen on the way. Uncared, unloved, unwatched things. A man passes me too close and the guitar he is carrying on his back hits my hand. We both turn at the same time to say sorry.
Finlay Macdonald and Alan Hollinghurst talk mainly about The Stranger’s Child, and it’s hard to talk about The Stranger’s Child without talking about Tennyson and in particular Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’. That line, that stanza which embodies the idea that in 100 years everyone we see on the street we walk along will be dead and the people who stand in our landscapes will be not only strangers but eventually the children of stranger. Time and memory – a fresh association blowing – The Stranger’s Child seems to pivot on the product of these.
Hollinghurst says that books often reveal more about their authors than they know. The Stranger’s Child is not a book he could have written 10 years ago. He talks about the strangeness of being of an age where whole areas of one’s past are hard to remember. About the stories that people make up to fill these gaps. He says these concerns resonate in The Stranger’s Child .
Macdonald asks him if the novels start with an idea like this, which he then fleshes out into a book. No, he says. The books creep up on him in little pieces. Generally they begin with a relationship or an image. He explains he wanted to write a book about the Great War without the war. He wanted instead to explore, on a domestic and intimate scale, how people coped with the immense trauma of war after the event. He says these ideas are never completely separate from his characters.
And yes, there is a lot of Tennyson and Rupert Brooke. Macdonald brings up detail after detail from Brooke’s life that echoes in the figure of Cecil Valance. Finally he mentions the efforts Brooke’s family made to control how he would be remembered. ‘Yes,’ Hollinghurst says. ‘I very much stole that idea.’ But Brooke appears in the novel. It’s a very clever trick, if you’re basing a character on a real person, have that person appear and that takes everyone’s eye off the ball. The audience laughs.Hollinghurst draws an image of a shelf of books full of poets who were intensely popular at a particular time and are now forgotten. ‘This is the pathos and the comedy of the literary personality.’
Hollinghurst had to write poetry for The Stranger’s Child and Macdonald congratulates him on the deftness of this. ‘It had to be good,’ he says, ‘but also not too good.’ Hollinghurst started as a port but his poetry ‘dried up’ when he started writing The Swimming Pool Library. He has an unfulfilled contract for a book of poetry with Faber and Faber. He says writing Valance’s poetry was very much like writing in another voice and explains that, ‘Voice is the motor that does the writing for you.’
There’s a lot of gaps in The Stranger’s Child, Macdonald says. Does Hollinghurst know all of what happens? Hollinghurst smiles, it was a great relief to realise that he didn’t have to know everything. He says that his editor arrived at a meeting with a family tree of the novel and Hollinghurst was happily surprised to see that it did indeed all work out. He explains that once he had embraced the idea of a ‘gappy read’, a book where readers would take a couple of pages at the beginning of each section to get their bearings, that part of the project of the later book was to reconstruct the beginning, that the reader would share some of the confusion of the characters, that the book would be an embodiment of our ‘shaky grasp on the past’ once he embraced all this he felt fine with the idea that there are some things no one will know.
When Macdonald opens the floor for questions, someone asks about sex. There is less sex written in The Stranger’s Child than Hollinghurst’s earlier work. He explains this is partly strategic. That other people’s sex lives are usually invisible to us. That the lack of descriptions of sexual acts adds to his aim of presenting a book where some things remain hidden and mysterious. Some people are happy about this, he jokes. He recalls a review for The Stranger’s Child which appeared in ‘Country Life’ paraphrasing it as, ‘Thank heavens Mr Hollinghurst has ceased to favour us with his descriptions of gay sex which have ruined his earlier work.’
Another audience member asks if there is also pressure to put back in all that ‘big gay sex’ – is there pressure to be a certain kind of gay writer? Hollinghurst explains that the whole world was so different in the mid 80s for a gay man. When he began to write he felt like he was exploring territory that had never been explored and it was exhilarating. ‘I took full advantage of the moment,’ he says. But he was also aware of being identified as a representative gay writer. He explains he has always tried to resist conforming to any idea of what he should be. He explains that during the AIDS crisis there was general pressure to write an ‘AIDS novel’ and with the backdrop of this pressure he made a decision not to extend The Swimming Pool Library past 1983. It wasn’t until he wrote The Line of Beauty, when he was able to place the AIDS crisis as part of a larger historical moment, that he felt ready to write about it.
When I came out of the Embassy all the weight had gone from the day. It was raining. I run to catch up with Larree Lust so I can walk home with her and Jacqui McRae. We talk about writing, windows that need cleaning and Greymouth. I arrive home with wet face, wet hands and began to write this from memory and notes.
Pip Adam
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