KEY POINTS:
If being an acclaimed international movie star, director and writer is the recipe for baking a gigantic ego, Richard E. Grant has bypassed the process.
At yesterday's Bad Dads in Meltdown panel session at the Writers & Readers Festival, Grant cut a quietly modest figure as he read from his Wah-Wah Diaries: The Making of a Film, which was based on his turbulent life as a child when the family lived in Swaziland in fading colonial times.
His mother left the family in 1967 when Grant was a lad, and his father drank himself into violent oblivion for the next 20 years. Teetotaller Grant's excerpt was particularly poignant, describing his father's deathbed scene as he whispered to his son that he had never stopped loving his mother.
Watching Gabriel Byrne play the father, Grant told the audience, brought the shock of that revelation to life once more. Sadly, his father - who had often told his son he was "useless" - didn't live to see his success.
At the same session, Spooks writer Neil Cross depicted his wayward stepdad - "a cross between Colonel Mainwaring and French actor Alain Delon" - whom he has dissected in his memoir, Heartland. Derek Cross, he drily explained, was a serial husband, fantasist and racist who became a Mormon and vacuum cleaner salesman - and left him and his mother for a black woman.
Owen Scott, author of Deep Beyond the Reef, about his brother's murder in Fiji, also had some painfully funny things to say about his Errol Flynn-like dad, a pompous alcoholic who got so drunk and incontinent on a first class flight back to rehab in New Zealand he had to be hoisted off the aircraft in a catering unit.
Drink was the common theme with all three writers in this panel.
Yesterday's sessions got off to a flying start with Carolyn Burke, the biographer of American war photographer Lee Miller.
With a large screen showing Miller's shocking images she took when Dachau concentration camp was liberated, and her famous staged shot taken in Hitler's bathtub in Munich on April 30, 1945, Burke analysed the ongoing impact of that experience on Miller's psyche. It was a powerful, harrowing session.
The night before, Opening Night Global Reach featured five authors lined up on stage in black armchairs, trapped under bright spotlights - book reading presented as theatre. Glamorous actress Jennifer Ward-Lealand chaired the event, possibly to add to the dramatic experience.
It was a novel way to do book reading, even unsettling, but it is lovely to be read to when the writers are so good at it.
Tim Winton, not one to make too much of an occasion of things, wore a grey T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, and read from his collection of interlinked short stories, The Turning.
It was a funny and melancholy excerpt, and Winton's voice was as soft and gentle as a lullaby. The audience was wide awake.
Like Winter, Lionel Shriver has long hair, but she wore it loose and cut a striking figure in a short flared skirt revealing muscular pins tucked into spiky heels.
After Winton's lovable gentleness, it took a moment to adjust but as she read a scene from The Post-Birthday World, she also captivated the crowd.
Kate Grenville was warm and smart, Richard E. Grant was hilarious and vicious, and Pico Iyer charming, thoughtful and self-deprecating.
- additional reporting: Margo White
Programme at www.writersfestival.co.nz
