Book month arrives
Hamilton Book Month will aim to answer your burning questions: how do you combat writer’s block, does coffee help with your prose and how long does it take to write a bestseller?
The wide range of events planned should cater for most interests, organisers say.
For keen cooks, there will be opportunities for a chat with Emma Galloway, Alexa Johnston, Bev Woods and Denise Irvine.
Closet sleuths can get captivated by Paul Cleave’s thrillers, and music lovers can unite at the panel orchestrated by musician Matthew Bannister. There really is a genre for everyone in the 15 events planned for numerous locations in the Waikato.
Hamilton Book Month committee member Catherine Wallace said the attendance last year averaged 40 at each event.
The most popular, with around 70 guests was Cooking the Books, Wallace said, where cookbook writers and food reviewers flocked to discuss thier ideas. She suspects this year’s event will be just as wellreceived.
Fans of poetry are also catered for. Poet, children’s author and doctor Glenn Colquhoun will hold a private afternoon event and a public evening workshop.
In conjunction with National Poetry Day, Year 10 students from five Hamilton secondary schools have been selected to hear Colquhoun’s writing strategies on August 26.
He will also be in conversation with local poet and author Peter Dornauf at Creative Waikato that same evening. Wallace said the poetry was ‘‘really accessible’’ and would be quite a fun event.
One quarter of the fiction panel is Julie Thomas, the author behind the familiar covers of The Keeper of Secrets and Rachel’s Legacy.
She will sit alongside New Zealand fiction authors Charity Norman, Deborah Challinor and Thom Conroy in conversation with Kirstine Moffat on August 17.
Hamilton Book Month branched off from New Zealand Book Month in 2014 and Wallace said there were a lot of people in our region who still loved to read.
For details, see the page or the .