Illuminating offerings from Auckland festival

Douglas Wright (left) and Augusten Burroughs read extracts from their work. Picture / Paul Estcourt

A simple question from the floor sent ripples through the session The Nature of Blood, where Witi Ihimaera and Caribbean-born British writer Caryl Phillips gave readings that illuminated the efforts to grow beyond colonisation, the legacy of the slave trade and the stark realities of being black in a white-dominated society.

So where are the Maori in the audience, demanded one man.

He had a point. Look round any session and it's plain the audiences are predominantly homogeneous. As one prominent writer tells me, they always are in Auckland and Wellington.

Is there a solution? Nature of Blood chairman James George suggested that Maori and Pacific Island people might not feel comfortable coming to a plush venue such as the Hilton.

Phillips said he had never attended an international writers festival with such a lack of representation from Africa or the Caribbean.

Ihimaera, who looked perturbed, suggested time might present a resolution as the population "laminates".

To prove that readers will go to see the writers they like, look no further than Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, whose novel Q & A is a worldwide hit.

Swarup pulled off a sublime reading from the book to a packed Exhibition Room with, yes, some people from the Indian community, and he was clearly thrilled with the response.

Just one little old lady had mistakenly lined up for his book-signing in Adelaide, he claimed, although he's such a clever diplomat he may have been playing to the house.

The line for his signings here was huge. Mainly women...the smoothie.

The flamboyant personality of Augusten Burroughs dominated every session he attended.

Scalded Alive, the tri-panel of Burroughs, dancer Douglas Wright and Alice Sebold, was a platform for each to read from their excoriating memoirs, Dry, Ghost Dance and Lucky.

There was nothing to laugh about in Sebold's stark account of her elderly neighbour's brutal assault, or Wright's poetic rendering of surreal nights in a Manhattan gay bar.

Burroughs' account of an episode in Los Angeles while making a beer ad, where he and his indifferent assistant spotted a hijacked bus with the sign "Help, call police", was brutally hilarious.

As each got down to the business of the nature of truth in memoir, Burroughs was asked what he'd do if his mother wrote her own memoir, about him. "I'd sue."

Those bass rumblings through the floor during that panel was the work of science enthusiast Simon "Big Bang" Singh, and Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven played twice - the orthodox way, then backwards.

It was just one component of a brilliant pop-science lecture on the nature of truth and interpretation.

If you are told something is there, such as certain backward lyrics that Singh warned the spellbound audience to listen for, you will hear it. The theory applies to science.

As one audience member said, if science was taught in schools a la Singh, New Zealand would be a nation of physicists.

Truth was also the essence of American biographer Deirdre Bair as she delivered the inaugural Michael King Memorial Lecture.

Bair's difficult journeys through the lives of Samuel Beckett and Simone De Beauvoir, who were alive when she worked on the projects, were fascinating. Worse was to come with the Anais Nin and Carl Jung books.

It was a terrific tribute to the life work of Michael King.

* The Herald is a gold sponsor of the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival.