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He may have been reading with some of the world's top writers but Witi Ihimaera held his own at New Zealand's premier literature festival.
The Kiwi author was invited along with Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz and English novelist Sarah Hall to read from his latest work at the eighth Auckland Writers and Readers Festival last night.
"I'm an Aucklander. I don't know what I'm doing here with these distinguished people," Ihimaera told an audience of hundreds at the Aotea Centre.
The University of Auckland professor and author of the Whale Rider - which was later turned into a movie - read an excerpt from his latest book, Ask the Posts of the House.
The story tells of a man whose father keeps phoning him in the early hours of the morning because he is afraid that if he sleeps he won't wake up. "It's no secret that I've based it on my own parents," Ihimaera said.
"Well, it's no secret to my parents that I've based it on them because they hate it.
"[My father] is cantankerous. He won't wear his hearing aid and is quite disobedient to me, but he's still my Dad.
"I rang him up and said I will be doing this tonight. There was a long silence and he said, 'I just don't know why you keep doing this to me'."
Ihimaera also spoke about turning another one of his books - The Matriarch, which he wrote in 1986 - into a movie.
"Writing a film script is the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. Before that I used to say, 'Any old hack can write a film script'. Even though people say films are the new literature ... I think we can do it better."
Coetzee, the South African awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, read from his book Diary of a Bad Year.
Coetzee is also one of only two authors to have won the Man Booker Prize twice, the first time in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K and the other in 1999 for Disgrace.
Diaz, the famed American-Dominican prose writer, read from his book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Hall read from part of her award-winning book The Carhullan Army.
The festival was created in 1999 by a committed group of writers and book lovers eager for an Auckland festival of ideas celebrating books and reading.
* The festival, which finishes on Sunday, is being held in the Aotea Centre. For a full schedule, log on to www.writersfestival.co.nz
