Auckland Writers Festival: Actor-writers to headline festival

Scottish actor Alan Cumming wrote about his sadistic father. Photo / Kevin Garcia

Little Britain comedian earns $14 million from children’s books, while Good Wife star acclaimed for memoir.

Two British actors who have forged successful parallel writing careers will headline the Auckland Writers Festival in May.

David Walliams, who wrote and starred in the Bafta Award-winning TV comedy Little Britain from 2003-2005, has since become a hugely popular children's book writer, with titles like Gangsta Granny, Mr Stink and Awful Auntie selling more than 500,000 copies last year, earning him more than $14 million.

Scottish actor Alan Cumming, who plays political strategist Eli Gold in The Good Wife TV series, has a multi-faceted career on stage and screen as well as prominence as a gay rights campaigner. Last year he published a highly regarded memoir, Not My Father's Son, in which he detailed the vicious sadism of his forester father, who died in 2010. Father and son had not spoken for 16 years. Cumming will be in conversation with actor Michael Hurst.

David Walliams.

A festival high note will be reclusive Japanese literary legend Haruki Murakami, whose Auckland visit is an Australasian exclusive. "Murakami is a literary superstar and someone continually invited to festivals around the world but little seen," said director Anne O'Brien.

The strong non-fiction lineup includes British investigative journalist Nick Davies, whose book Hack Attack detailed his expose for the Guardian newspaper of the Rupert Murdoch-News of the World phone-hacking scandal; Helen Macdonald, whose memoir H Is for Hawk won the 2014 Costa Book of the Year; New Yorker magazine writer Ken Auletta, author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It; Chinese writer Xinran, whose latest book, Buy Me the Sky, looks at the effect of China's single-child policy; British science writer Philip Ball, author of Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler; New York literary critic Daniel Mendelsohn; and Boston-based surgeon Professor Atul Gawande, whose acclaimed book Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End examines how we deal with dying in the modern age.

Kids are in for a treat, with British writer Anthony Horowitz, of Alex Rider fame, and Dav Pilkey aka Captain Underpants included in the schools' programme.

As a special event, British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy will join actors Fiona Samuel and Rachel House in performances of Duffy's The World's Wife, celebrating invented women such as Queen Kong and the Kray Sisters.

International fiction writers include David Mitchell, of Cloud Atlas fame, and Booker Prize-winner Ben Okri.

Australians at the festival are food writing legend Stephanie Alexander, sports writer and historian Peter FitzSimons, National Living Treasure Tim Winton and novelist Helen Garner. Our own living treasure, novelist and poet C.K. Stead, will be the festival's Honoured New Zealand Writer, while the Great Kiwi Classic is Janet Frame's 1957 debut novel, Owls Do Cry.

New Zealand writers include Witi Ihimaera, Hollie Fullbrook (aka Tiny Ruins), Greg O'Brien, artist Grahame Sydney and the Herald's Steve Braunias.

BBC journalist Bill Hayton will deliver the Michael King Memorial Lecture on May 17, dissecting the geopolitical struggle for the South China Sea.

Last year's festival sold 55,000 tickets.

Festival venues
Auckland Writers Festival runs at the Aotea Centre and associated venues from May 13-17. Tickets go on sale from tomorrow; see writersfestival.co.nz.