Lauren Keenan in conversation with Tania Miller
How can adults help spark children’s interest in Aotearoa New Zealand history? Lauren often gets asked this question and it is a subject close to her heart. Lauren talks to Tania about making history accessible and interesting to young readers and the special nature of writing for the middle reader audience.
The conversation is pitched at an adult festival audience, but the middle reader in your life is also welcome, accompanied by an adult. Lauren's middle reader books are Amorangi and Millie’s Trip Through Time and its sequel Rimu: The Tree of Time.
They follow two siblings who time travel back through their family tree and witness events in New Zealand history, including the invasion of Parihaka, the Great Depression, World War Two, the Musket Wars, and the eruption of Mount Taranaki. The siblings also experience changes in their town and landscape, the attitudes of people, and the way people live their lives.
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Chris Tse - An Hour with the Poet Laureate
Chris Tse in conversation with Sally McLennan
At the 2024 Marlborough Book Festival, the Poet Laureate talks about and reads from his poetry collections in which he explores questions of identity, including his Chinese heritage and queer identity, and addresses Aotearoa history. He also reflects on his time as Poet Laureate and his hopes for the power of poetry.
Chris Tse is the New Zealand Poet Laureate 2022-2025. His first collection, How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014), won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry. The collection revisits the 1905 murder of Joe Kum Yung at the hands of the racist Lionel Terry. His second book, HE’S SO MASC, explores themes of identity, sexuality and pop culture. It received critical acclaim and was included in the New Zealand Herald‘s Best Books of 2018 and The Spinoff’s 20 Best Poetry Books of 2018.
His most recent collection of poetry, Super Model Minority (2022), was longlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and was a finalist for the Gay Poetry Award at the 35th Lambda Literary Awards. With Emma Barnes, Chris co-edited Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa (Auckland University Press, 2021). Chris is the editor of The Spinoff’s Friday Poem. Te Pouhuaki National Librarian Rachel Esson described Chris’s appointment as Poet Laureate as recognition of “a poet leading a generational and cultural shift in the reach and appreciation of poetry in Aotearoa”.
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Nic Low - Uprising, Walking the Southern Alps of New Zealand
Nic Low is a writer, editor, arts organiser, te reo student, and dad with whakapapa links to Ōraka-Aparima in Southland. His writing on wilderness, technology, and race has been widely published and anthologised. His first book Arms Race, a collection of speculative fictions was shortlisted for the Readings and Steele Rudd prizes and named New Zealand Listener and Australian Book Review book of the year. He is a contributing editor at New Zealand Geographic magazine with a focus on Māori perspectives and former Programme Director of the WORD Christchurch Festival.
Uprising, Walking the Southern Alps of New Zealand
Nic Low in conversation with Dr Peter Meihana
Armed with Ngāi Tahu’s traditional oral maps and modern satellite atlas, Nic crossed the Southern Alps more than a dozen times, trying to understand how his Ngāi Tahu forebears saw the land. He discusses his book with Dr Peter Meihana (Rangitāne, Ngāti Kuia, Ngāti Apa ki te Rā Tō, Ngāi Tahu). Part gripping adventure story and part meditation on history and place, Uprising recounts Nic’s alpine expeditions to unlock stories living in the land.
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Sue McCauley - Landed
Sue McCauley QSM, is a novelist, short story writer, playwright, journalist, and screenwriter. Her first novel, Other Halves (1982), won the Wattie Book of the Year Award and the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. It was reprinted numerous times, in New Zealand and overseas, and was made into a film. In subsequent years Sue wrote five more novels, two short story collections and a biography. She has also written drama for stage and TV and adapted her own novel for the film Other Halves. Sue’s first book was loosely based on the early — and unconventional — relationship between Sue and her husband, Pat.
Sue discusses her latest novel, Landed, and reflects on her writing life in conversation with Tessa Nicholson. Landed is a wry, pensive, character-driven novel that is a close examination of what matters most in life. It’s about reconciling familial obligation with a sense of purpose and relevance, it’s about the inevitability of growing old, the importance of connection, and the need to find ‘home’.
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Nici Wickes - A Quiet Kitchen
Nici Wickes was the Instagram foodie we all needed during lockdown - down to earth, great fun, and cooking up a storm with mostly pantry ingredients. Her gorgeous cookbooks A Quiet Kitchen and the just-released More from a Quiet Kitchen include many of those recipes along with her honest reflections on her struggle to find contentment in mid-age, how she finds happiness in living alone in a quiet coastal community, and where she draws inspiration from.
Most of her recipes serve one or two and serve to inspire those who also live alone, though many are easily scaled up if you have friends over. Nici says: “I want this book to be a cookbook but also a guide to becoming accomplished at living alone, healthily, joyfully, quietly, whilst still feeling engaged and connected to the world and staying open to the mystery of it all.”
Hear Nici talking with Tania Miller at the 2024 Marlborough Book Festival about her cookbooks, her mid-life sea change, and how choosing to eat well goes hand in hand with choosing to live well.
The Marlborough Book Festival is an annual readers and writers festival held in July in Marlborough, New Zealand. Listen to our podcasts to hear discussions with our featured writers, as they explain the challenges and the highlights of creating their various works and their lives as writers.
For more information, head to: https://www.marlboroughbookfest.co.nz/
New Zealand