KEY POINTS:
It will be interesting to see if film-maker Annie Goldson and writer Owen Scott receive a warm welcome in Fiji when their documentary, An Island Calling, screens there in a couple of weeks.
The film, based on Scott's book Deep Beyond the Reef, arcs towards the Suva murder in 2001 of Scott's brother, Red Cross worker John Scott, and his partner, Greg Scribener.
Yesterday, the Writers Festival audience was given a taster with two clips from the film during the Goldson-Scott session: one showing Scott travelling upriver to visit the graves of his father and grandfather; the other his meeting with the deeply religious Kaisau family of his brother's young killer, who turned out to be insane.
Given that the boy's father had earlier told reporters he would have murdered the pair with a machete if his son had not, it was a fraught situation that Scott and the Kaisaus both handled with quiet dignity.
The book and the film are about much more than the murders. Goldson said both were an attempt to get at the heart of a little-explored history - of the impact of colonialism in the Pacific. TV3 will screen An Island Calling this year.
The session, in the Aotea Centre's Lower NZI Room, was well attended, as was the earlier hour with Shonagh Koea, who chatted with chairman Peter Wells about her memoir The Kindness of Strangers and how it was so much easier to write fiction.
Writing the book, she said matter-of-factly, gave her terrible nightmares for months. But the audience laughed when she said she could not relate to people "with a funny look about them as if everything has always gone right". They knew what shemeant.
Italian economist Loretta Napoleoni was a popular speaker in the main ASB Theatre, as Mark Sainsbury took her methodically through the disturbing issues tackled in her book Rogue Economics.
Napoleoni ran through a litany of free-market disasters - labour and sexual slavery, counterfeit drugs, the rocketing price of oil, food and water shortages, the imminent collapse of the US economy - before pronouncing herself an optimist.
Judging by the applause, she was preaching to the converted.
* For today's festival highlights, see www.writersfestival.co.nz
