Ak Writers Festival: David Malouf

Australian writer David Malouf. Photo / Supplied

Saturday's Auckland Writers & Readers Festival started strongly in the morning with a well-attended hour with Australian writer David Malouf, who charmed his near-full capacity audience at the Aotea Centre with an effortless series of anecdotes about growing up in Brisbane, his first newspaper production - and his views on the Brad Pitt movie, Troy.

Malouf, whose latest novel Ransom reinterprets the fall of Troy as related in the classic The Iliad, said the film, which he thought pretty awful (the details were all wrong), overtook his book, so he held it back until the hype died down.

Malouf said that although his mother and Cassie, the girl who worked in their house, both left school when they were 12, they were book lovers who read aloud to each other every day. That¹s how he first got hooked on reading.

Modelling himself on Jo in Little Women, who made her own newspaper, Malouf did the same when he was just a lad. Describing himself as a practised voyeur, the paper he distributed around the neighbourhood was all about the things his mother was doing.

He also recalled that he was first taught The Iliad in 1943 at school by a teacher called Mrs Findlay. After Ransom was published, he ran into Mrs Findlay. She was 93.