Charisma meets obsession in Eric Hansen

Eric Hansen addresses the guests at the New Zealand Herald lunch. Picture / Dean Purcell

Eric Hansen is better looking than in his photographs. He dresses well: tweedy jacket, mauvey pink shirt and grey jeans.

His hands are OK, eye contact steady, smile genuine. But it's his voice that gets to me. It's soothing and resonant with a genuine-feeling intimacy that makes it hard to believe he's not going to be my friend forever - which, of course, is how Eric Hansen, writer, works.

The voice works well at the Herald lunch at the Hilton too. The 130 guests listen, spellbound, as he tells his stories at the festival lunch Random Meetings With Strangers, and explains his remarkable career.

His career is based on perusing the most challenging places in the world, chasing a person or a story as it comes up, making a connection - then writing about the experience.

The people he finds are variable, the experiences life-threatening, sexy, occasionally hilarious. There's the lap dancer he met through his botanist friend, the guy from Tanna in Vanuatu who introduced him to "two-day kava", Don Tutu who taught him about Maldive fish.

The one thing that's always the same is that Hansen doesn't just steal peoples' stories - he builds genuine friendships. As he says, "I go into a state of mind where sleeping and eating are put aside. When I get on to a story I'm obsessed. I find if I'm willing to follow a story it'll take me to places I could never imagine."

And this isn't just in his writing life. "I went to New York for five days and stayed five years - that's typical of the way I move in the world."

He jots down names, thoughts, sketches and snatches of conversation in small, spiral-bound notebooks. Once, when things got tough, he wrapped his journals in plastic and buried them on an island off Yemen. He didn't get back to dig them up for 11 years. He mined these books for his latest collection, The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer.

Today, after 30 years of travelling and writing, editors wait a year for a Hansen travel article while his book editors accept his proposals straight off. It all changed, he says, when 12 agents got into a bidding war for Stranger in the Forest at the Frankfurt book fair, driving up the price to a sum so immense "I thought they'd put the decimal figure in the wrong place".

It was that deal, 15 years ago, that gave Hansen the freedom to buy a house, give up the building and fishing boats and write fulltime.

The constant travelling is obviously hard on relationships and Hansen is recently divorced. He lives in the Sacramento Valley outside Los Angeles, working morning and evenings in a converted garage in his rose and citrus garden. "I usually want to be writing when the sun comes up."

Eric Hansen: Today at noon

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