Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will appear alongside our most acclaimed authors and international heavy-hitters including 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer, American musician Jeff Tweedy and Canadian novelist Anne Michaels at this year's Auckland Writers Festival.
The programme for the 19th Auckland Writers Festival comprises more than 200 events and 230 globally recognised writers and intellectuals. Last year's festival attracted around 75,000 and this year's looks set to be just as popular with Ardern's Friday talk, Stardust & Substance, likely to be a top drawcard.
She'll discuss with journalist Toby Manhire the weeks leading up to the 2017 election and reflect on the impact of the result domestically and internationally.
Alongside Greer, Tweedy and Michaels, international names also include British historian Sir Antony Beevor, Kamila Shamsie, the 2018 British Women's Prize-winning novelist, Australian best-seller Markus Zusak, Irish novelist John Boyne, visual artist and writer Douglas Coupland, and the UK's Sally Gardner who made her name writing children's and young adult books but also writes erotic fiction for adults under the nom de plume Wray Delaney.
On the local front, Tessa Duder, Stephanie Johnson, Lloyd Jones, Fiona Kidman, Witi Ihimaera, Albert Wendt and Vincent O'Sullivan, Paula Morris, Marilyn Waring, Sir Kim Workman, Sandra Coney and artist Gretchen Albrecht will participate in conversations, panel discussions and book-signings while former Straitjacket Fits front man Shayne Carter will talk about his soon to be released memoir Dead People I Have Known.