2010 Festival Programme - Special Events

HIGH TEA

WEDNESDAY MAY 12 – 3.30-5.00PM
CROWNE PLAZA AUCKLAND, THE ELLIOTT ROOMS

A Treasury of New Zealand Baking brought together a wealth of our best food writers and chefs to share their favourite recipes from generations past for generations to come. This very special event features Lauraine Jacobs, Tui Flower, Julie Biuso and Julie Le Clerc in a celebration of baking with a traditional “High Tea”. Enjoy exceptional Dilmah Teas, a selection of sensational dainties, and the wisdom and tales of four of New Zealand’s most popular food writers on the traditions of baking.

SPECIAL EVENT: TICKETS
Standard $40.00
Club Members $32.00
Please note: seats are limited, door sales are not available, and all seats must be booked by Monday 10 May.

TVNZ 7 presents: THE GOOD WORD DEBATE 2010

WEDNESDAY MAY 12 – 6.30-9.00PM
ST MATTHEW-IN-THE-CITY, CNR HOBSON & WELLESLEY STREETS

Be part of the audience for The Good Word Debate, filmed live at Auckland’s beautiful St Matthew-in-the-City. Novelist Emily Perkins (host of TVNZ 7 book series The Good Word) is joined by series regulars Finlay Macdonald, Gordon McLauchlan, Steve Braunias, Bill Hastings and Jennifer Ward-Lealand to argue the moot: “Off the Shelf and Into the Hard-drive: The Book is Dead”. Keeping things seemly as moderator, comedian Te Radar. Partake of wine and nibbles from 6.30pm, followed by the Debate at 7.30pm.

SPECIAL EVENT: TICKETS
Standard $25.00
Club Members $20.00
Please note: door sales are not available, and all seats must be booked by Monday 10 May.

LUNCH WITH RICK GEKOSKI

THURSDAY MAY 13 – 12.00-2.00PM
SOUL BAR & RESTAURANT, THE VIADUCT

Rick Gekoski is the author of Tolkien’s Gown & Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books, a legendary storyteller and raconteur, and a self-confessed “book addict”. An expert in rare books and manuscripts, he started his business in 1982, but attributes the start of his career to 1969, when he sold a £10 set of Dickens books for £20 to Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford to buy his girlfriend a Tibetan coat, then the height of fashion.

Rick has worked as a publisher, academic, critic, bibliographer and broadcaster, was a Booker Prize judge in 2005, and is currently Chairman of Judges for the 2011 Man Booker International Prize. His new book Outside of a Dog is a ‘bibliomemoir”, a fascinating and whimsical account of twenty-five books that have influenced his life, from Dr Seuss and J.D. Salinger to Germaine Greer, Freud and Wittgenstein, in which he casts an ironic and analytic eye on the books, their authors and ultimately, on himself. Enjoy a three course lunch with Man O’War Wine as Rick shares tales of his life in books with Kim Hill.

SPECIAL EVENT: TICKETS
Standard $70.00
Club Members $56.00

Please note: door sales are not available, and all seats must be booked by Monday 10 May.

NEW ZEALAND LISTENER OPENING NIGHT

THURSDAY MAY 13 – 7.30PM
ASB THEATRE, AOTEA CENTRE

One of the most popular events of the festival, the New Zealand Listener Opening Night is a welcoming celebration which introduces you to just a few of this year’s lyrical, luminary and spellbinding writers. Enjoy the dulcet tones of Colm Tóibín with his latest bestseller, Brooklyn; Emily Perkins and the 2009 Montana Medal for Fiction winner Novel About My Wife; man of many talents, interests and stories, Thomas Keneally with The People’s Train; bestselling author of Eat, Pray Love Elizabeth Gilbert with her new book Committed, and William Dalrymple with his latest boo

k, Nine Lives. Join our distinguished guests for an evening of inspired readings.

SPECIAL EVENT: TICKETS

Earlybird (pre 12 May) $27.00
Club Members $25.50
Students $16.00
Standard (from 12 May) $32.00

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

FRIDAY MAY 14 – 7.30PM
ASB THEATRE, AOTEA CENTRE

William Dalrymple, popular 2003 Festival guest and the prize-winning author of White Mughals and City of Djinns, returns to Auckland for an exclusive tour through his new book Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. The book is a distillation of his 25

years of exploring India and its religious traditions, and this modern Indian Canterbury Tales introduces us to characters and worlds we might never have imagined existed.

A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet – then spends years trying to atone for the violence by hand-printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve to death. A woman leaves her middle-class family in Calcutta, and her job in a jute factory, only to find unexpected love and fulfilment living as a tantric in a skull-filled hut in a remote cremation ground. A prison warden from Kerala becomes, for two months of the year, a temple dancer and is worshipped as an incarnate deity; then, at the end of February each year, he returns to prison. An illiterate goat-herder from Rajasthan keeps alive an ancient 4000-line sacred epic that he, virtually alone, still knows by heart. A devadasi – or temple prostitute – initially resists her own initiation into sex work, yet pushes both her daughters into a trade she now regards as a sacred calling. Nine people, nine lives. Each one taking a different religious pa

th, each one an unforgettable story. Exquisite and mesmerising, Nine Lives is William Dalrymple’s first travel book in a decade. He explores how traditional forms of religious life in South Asia have been transformed in the vortex of the region’s rapid change.

“William Dalrymple’s study of the people and beliefs of India ranks with the very finest travel writing… Nine Lives is a travel book, but it is also a series of biographies which unpick the rich religious heritage of the subcontinent. It makes its political points more powerfully than any newspaper article, while quietly adjusting a reader’s attitude to faith. It displays deep knowledge of the culture. At its best travel writing beats fiction, firing the imagination with tales of foreign peoples drawn close by our common humanity. This is travel writing at its very best.” Ruaridh Nicoll, Observer

SPECIAL EVENT: TICKETS
Earlybird (pre 12 May) $27.00
Club Members $25.50
Students $16.00
Standard (from 12 May) $32.00

ELIZABETH GILBERT

SATURDAY MAY 15 – 7.30PM
ASB THEATRE, AOTEA CENTRE

Don’t miss this exclusive appearance by the author of bestselling phenomenon Eat, Pray Love. Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, takes us on the metaphysical journey she initiates having found herself “sentenced” to marry to save her relationship, despite both parties having vowed “never again”. She copes with this pronouncement in the only way she knows how – by throwing herself into researching “this befuddling, vexing, contradictory, and yet stubbornly enduring institution of marriage”. From examining the lives of her female forebears to interviewing bemused Hmong women in the mountains of Vietnam, no stone is left unturned in her efforts to uncover the rationale behind the traditions and mores, vagaries and social impact of marriage. And she uncovers a number of surprising facts along the way. Enjoy an uplifting evening of laughter and inspiration. Chair: Carol Hirschfeld.

SPECIAL EVENT: TICKETS
Earlybird (pre 12 May) $27.00
Club Members $25.50
Students $16.00
Standard (from 12 May) $32.00

POETRY IDOL

SUNDAY MAY 16 – 7.00PM
MONTECRISTO ROOM – 53 NELSON STREET

Poetry Idol is back and better than ever on a Sunday night! Be prepared to queue out the door or camp overnight to get a seat. A night of feverish lyricism, hallucinatory language and astounding nouns and adjectives, and that’s just from the judges: UK DJ/poet and hip-hop artist Charlie Dark, screenwriter, funny man and long-ago poet Nick Ward, and a powerhouse from the Australian poetry scene, Alicia Sometimes. Slam empress Penny Ashton MC’s. Prospective Idols: please go to the festival website for information about prizes on offer, and how to get an audition.

SPECIAL EVENT: TICKETS
Standard Price for all $10.00

Door tickets are subject to availability. We cannot guarantee there will be tickets available on the door and strongly recommend purchasing tickets in advance.