Readers and Writers: Magazine's talk of the town

Writer Judith Thurman told the Auckland audience of the joy of the unknown as she undertakes her escapist features.

Once a writer has reached the hallowed halls of The New Yorker, the only thing left to look forward to is death, quipped the panel members at New Yorker Night on Saturday.

"There's no other job a journalist could possibly want," fashion, arts and culture writer Judith Thurman told a captivated ASB Theatre during the Writers Festival's most awaited event.

Fellow panelist political commentator Hendrik Hertzberg, the "moral voice" of the magazine, did make an exception, however, when he left temporarily for the White House and a lowly job as Jimmy Carter's speechwriter.

Financial writer James Surowiecki, who started the magazine's first business column in the month the Nasdaq bubble burst, couldn't imagine working anywhere else, either.

He had much to say on how the magazine has adapted to modern times, his hiring indicative of that, and the magazine's leaner approach.

After a selection of the magazine's funniest cartoons displayed on the big screen, chairwoman Rhonda Sherman led a stimulating conversation on how The New Yorker's old-fashioned journalistic values - authority over subject matter, stylistic perfectionism, an army of fact-checkers - have helped the magazine survive to the grand old age of 85.

From the days when small-town man Harold W. Ross moved to the big city and started the magazine in the prohibition years, to its launching of the literary careers of John Updike, J.D. Salinger and Truman Capote to its present glory as Michelle Obama's apparent favourite, the focus has always been on quality and craft.

Thurman spoke of the joy of the unknown as she undertook her escapist features, of travels to film sets in war-torn Nicaragua and caving in the South of France.

Hertzberg spoke of spending three months with John Lennon before he was deported and later, the riskiness of positive political journalism, confessing he lost his critical faculties when he fell in love with Barack Obama.

And Surowiecki, whose page-long column is something of an anomaly in the features-heavy publication, spoke of the satisfaction in keeping readers abreast of business news, even if they're not particularly interested in business.

In an earlier panel, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a thought-provoking talk on her roots as a writer and a human - and how she brings alive her homeland in novels such as the award-winning Half of A Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus.

Elegant in heels, silky shirt and a pencil skirt, it was impossible not to warm to the young writer as she read an excerpt from her short story The Thing Around Your Neck in a rich, mellifluous voice and later confessed she'd never tried the ginger beer she so coveted as an Enid Blyton-loving teen. (This was swiftly seen to at the end of the session).

Headstrong and intelligent, her writing career took off when she fled medical school in Nigeria and moved to the US where her sister lived. This gave her a fresh pair of eyes with which to view her homeland.

She now divides her time between the US and Nigeria, a place that "most irritates me in the world but where I feel I belong".

The vivid worlds of her novels are in part thanks to a life-long obsession with history.

Chairwoman Paula Morris did a fine job of establishing rapport with interviewee and audience, asking pertinent questions on recurring themes in Adichie's work: the troubled history of her country, the disillusionment of immigration, the humour of clashing cultures.

"To be a writer I think you have to feel you don't quite belong," Adichie explained. "You're an observer. I've always felt that way."

The winners of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009 were announced at an awards ceremony on Saturday night.

Christos Tsiolkas of Australia won Best Book for The Slap and Mohammed Hanif of Pakistan won Best First Book for A Case of Exploding Mangoes.