NZ Book Month Reveals Secret Life of Writers

NZ Book Month is drawing to a close for another year, but not without a grand finale to celebrate Dunedin’s literary talent.

Poet David Eggleton, journalist Charmian Smith, novelist Vanda Symon, historian Neville Peat, and playwright and novelist Andrew Porteous will be coerced by Dougal Stevenson on Thursday, 31 March, into revealing the highs and lows of writing professionally.

Neville Peat has written forty books in his career, but also worked as a journalist, writing shipping news for Cape Town’s Argus newspaper and Dunedin's Evening Star in the 1970s. Peat was awarded New Zealand's highest literary prize, the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writers' Fellowship, in 2007, to undertake his latest work of non-fiction, Tasman, the Biography of an Ocean.

Andrew Porteous is a relative novice, taking up his pen in earnest only over the past five years, yet he has already won the Kingi McKinnon Scholarship for emerging New Zealand writers and, more recently, the Kinglake Publishing (UK) Unpublished Author Competition for his crime novel, A Political Affair.

Vanda Symon is a bestselling crime novelist who recently released Bound, the fourth book in her Sam Sheppard series, through Penguin NZ. Symon has been an active event organiser for NZ Book Month, and also manages to juggle motherhood, a PhD at the University of Otago and radio broadcasting.

Charmian Smith wages a daily battle with the short deadlines and ever-changing ‘news-scape’ at the Otago Daily Times. Currently the Food and Wine feature writer, Smith won a Culinary Quills Award from the New Zealand Guild of Food Writers in 2003, and has a Library Citation for her contribution in championing Dunedin’s local library network.

David Eggleton is one of Dunedin’s best-loved performing poets, whose award in 1985 as London’s Time Out Street Entertainer of the Year stood him in good stead - winning the PEN Best First Book of Poetry, and becoming the University of Otago’s Burns Fellow in 1990. He has thrilled and charmed audiences ever since, not only with poetry readings but with his collaborative work with other artists. He is currently the editor of Landfall, a prominent New Zealand arts and literature periodical.

Only rarely will you see such a diversely talented group in one room, and this is a golden opportunity for an audience to interrogate and draw inspiration from these dynamic Dunedin writers.

For bookings or more information, contact library@dcc.govt.nz or call 03 474 3690.