Enough of words, showtime

Festival organisers (from left) Jill Rawnsley, Peter Wells and Stephanie Johnson. Star guests include Augusten Burroughs, author of Dry, and Mark Kurlansky (Choice Cuts). Picture / Martin Sykes

Let the drama begin. The fifth Auckland Writers and Readers Festival kicks off tomorrow tonight with a public event showcasing its four literary heavyweights: Americans Alice Sebold, Mark Kurlansky and Augusten Burroughs, and Booker Prize-winning Briton Alan Hollinghurst.

The next three days, with programmes running in and around the Hilton on Princes Wharf from early morning till late at night, will test the stamina of the 130 New Zealand and international guest writers - and the audience, with ticket sales expected to exceed 10,000.

Organisers hope that all will run smoothly, but if the last four festivals are anything to go by, behind the scenes can be another story.

Festival manager Jill Rawnsley says that because some writers are not great time-keepers, she grew to know the stairs and lifts of the Hyatt Hotel, home to the previous festivals.

"Last time, I spent so much time running up and down the stairs of the Hyatt looking for people. That's why we keep them all [staying] at the hotel - we know where they are."

Except when a hotel fire alarm keeps going off. Co-creative director Peter Wells recalls a 3am false alarm at the 2003 festival that forced all the writers onto the street in their night attire. Chinese-American Amy Tan (Joy Luck Club) stood out in her Issey Miyake PJs and a fire mask.

"Not only that but at a breakfast session, when she was going on about her mother, she got to the perfect moment when she had paused for the punchline - and the alarm went off again."

Co-creative director Stephanie Johnson recalls with a shudder a certain proselytising writer who had recently found God.

"She decided that the sea of faces in front of her was a wonderful opportunity to gather some souls. That didn't go down too well."

Writers who cancel just after the programme has been printed have caused headaches. Annie Proulx did so in 2003, "but she gave us a reasonable amount of notice", says Rawnsley.

Not so another writer at the same festival, Johnson recalls: "We'd just got the Annie Proulx business sorted out and I was checking the emails one Saturday morning and got an email from [British writer] Iain Banks saying, 'You will know by now because I am so world-famous that everything I do is reported in the media'.

"He'd burned his passport and sent the ashes to Tony Blair as a protest against the Iraq war. He just assumed we would have known that."

Writers rowing in public can be interesting, Johnson says.

"The most famous one was in 2000 when we had historian Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto, who had just published what was supposed to be a history of truth. Because he's a practising Catholic, he left out the Inquisition. [New Zealand] historian Dick Scott had a go at him - that got very heated."

That's the way of a festival, she adds. "Writers are famously sociopathic and you have all these strange individuals cooped up together in one hotel. It can work - or not."

Johnson enjoys the diversity of the talent, and the audience.

"When we had [British rasta] poet Benjamin Zephaniah, the place filled up with rastas. It was wonderful to see Remuera matrons mixing it with rastas. We want more of that."

Auckland Writers & Readers Festival

* When: Opening Star Night, Aquamarine Room, Hilton Hotel, Princes Wharf, tomorrow 7.30pm, then full daily programmes Friday to Sunday.

* Where: Aquamarine & Exhibition Rooms at the Hilton are the main venues, with some events at Coast Bar, Maritime Museum and Northern Steamship Co Building.