Everyone who is anyone in New Zealand writing was at the Dunedin Writers Festival this weekend. Good old Becky Manawatu was there, giving a preview of the book she is writing as a kind of prequel to Auē , the most celebrated New Zealand novel since The Luminaries. Witi Ihimaera was there, selling so many copies of his latest book that University Book Sellers sold out its stock. Catherine Chidgey was there, also Elizabeth Knox, Brian Turner, Fiona Farrell, Emma Neale, Victor Billot, Vincent O’Sullivan, Rose Carlyle, Bruce Ansley, Talia Marshall and ex-MP Clare Curran, said to be working on a crime novel.
I was there. I loved it. It marked the first literary festival of the year – the Auckland Writers Festival starts on Friday – and opened the biggest week of the year for New Zealand writing. The Ockham book awards are held on Wednesday night. Two of the finalists were in Dunedin and both were chaired by one of the three or four best literary chairs in the country.
The weather was warm. Good old AH Reed is honoured with a plaque at the Octagon, which records his lyrical remark, “Otago was believed to be bleak and cold. This amusing mistaken notion is still held by a few people in the northern sub-tropical parts of New Zealand.” In temperatures of 21 degrees, students mooched around with bags of celery and fennel from the Saturday market, and a topless man clearly bedevilled with mental health issues twirled a baton in the middle of busy Stuart Street. The seas had been rough the past few days and the only fish available at legendary seafood joint Best Cafe was blue cod.
Dunedin looks after its visiting writers. We were hosted at The Victoria Hotel, a nice joint near the Octagon; Featherston Booktown, which also took place this weekend, chucked a bunch of writers into the cramped little space used as accomodation for jockeys at a racetrack an hour’s walk from town. Plus the Dunedin festival left $50 as a per diem in an envelope. Plus it ran a lively, inclusive programme with writers such as romance novelist Nalini Singh, and children’s writer Kyle Mewburn, author of a new memoir about the transition from he to her.
As the author of true-crime book Missing Persons, I shared a stage with Jared Savage, author of true-crime book Ganglands. We were chaired by Otago Daily Times court reporter Rob Kidd. We talked of shootings, stabbings, stranglings: and yet, as I pointed out, the notion only occuring to me while I spoke onstage, true-crime writing is rarely as explicit in its description of murder as a crime novel, which very often describes eviscarations and physical sufferings in intimate detail – and here I pointed into the audience at crime novelist Liam McIlvanney. Strange how journalism can be so much more cautious and decorous than writers of fiction.
I went to the unveiling of a plaque for Essie Summers in the Octagon. Essie (1912-98), a parson’s wife, sold 19 million copies of her romance novels. Dunedin mayor Aaron Hawkins compared her to Six60: “You don’t have to be critically valid to be significant.” Afterwards there was a splendid spread of ginger cake and scones with tea and coffee at the library. The spread was both critically valid and significant.
Lynn Freeman chaired Vince O’Sullivan. Lynn is among the best three or four literary chairs in New Zealand. She stays calm, is very, very smart, and knows how to follow as well as lead a conversation. It was an excellent session and Vince was in typical, epigrammatic form: “Art is the one guaranteed area in life where one is totally free.”
The next day, Lynn chaired Becky Manawatu. The Westport writer is the 2021 Burns Fellow in Dunedin and working hard on her second novel. She said she arrived with 30,000 words but realised 20,000 were total junk and gave them the heave-ho. An audience member asked if that chunk will ever see the light of day somewhere; calmly, ruthlessly, Becky replied that no, the 20,000 words were deleted. They no longer exist.
Her manuscript is now about 60,000 words. She said the book is a continuation of Auē, and tells the back story of one of the characters. She gave a reading from the book and it was electrifying, no one wanted it to end, it was classic Manawatu – lyrical, raw, heart-stopping. It was a scene of a woman cutting open a can of sweet corn with a knife to make her abusive partner a toasted sandwich, and imagining “the yellow mush inside turned into the man’s brains”.
The most exciting writer in New Zealand is well on her way.
