FESTIVAL PICKS

Here are five more authors to look out for at the 2023 Auckland Writers Festival.

ELEANOR CATTON

Ten years after the brilliant but not always accessible The Luminaries, Catton’s fast-paced satirical ecothriller Birnam Wood has been acclaimed by readers and critics. In a typical response, the New York Times calls it “a sophisticated page-turner” that made its reviewer nearly laugh with pleasure. One of no fewer than three Booker winners at the festival, the fiercely intelligent Catton will talk about Birnam Wood and the state of the modern world in a session with Grand author and broadcaster Noelle McCarthy.

RUBY TUI

The rugby star’s memoir, Straight Up, has been a runaway sensation and that’s not just because everyone loves the Black Ferns and especially the irreverent and charismatic Tui. It’s because Straight Up is not your standard, bland sports book but is instead a powerful and touching account of Tui’s determination to succeed despite her troubled and difficult upbringing. She will be in conversation with writer Madeleine Chapman, who did a great job of telling Steven Adams’ story.

COLSON WHITEHEAD

Whitehead’s slavery-era novel

The Underground Railroad was a wildly imaginative retelling of a dark period in US history that was quickly recognised as a major achievement of 21st-century writing – former President Barack Obama picked it as a favourite, it won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction and was adapted into a compelling TV series by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins. Whitehead’s latest novel, Harlem Shuffle ,is a crime story set in New York in the 1960s and the first part of a trilogy. He is a heavyweight.

BERNARDINE EVARISTO

The third Booker winner at the festival, Evaristo picked up the award in 2019 for Girl, Woman, Other, which made her the first black woman to win the prize in the five decades since it was launched. An academic, a playwright, a poet, an essayist as well as a novelist, she joins Catton and Karunatilaka for a Booker winners’ panel, as well as being grilled on her own by novelist and literary organiser Paula Morris.

KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Despite dying 100 years ago,

Mansfield will be everywhere at the festival. Her poems will become songs, her trips through Europe will be retold by historian Redmer Yska (author of the very good

A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington) and a line-up of greats, including CK Stead and Miranda Harcourt, will swap their Mansfield anecdotes.