Personal insights make Lord of the Flies' author human

<i>Sunday Times</i> literary critic John Carey has researched William Golding thoroughly. Photo / Supplied

The things one finds out in a Michael King Memorial Lecture: Lord of the Flies novelist William Golding enjoyed great literature but also found Jilly Cooper's Polo "not half bad - anatomically correct, like Leonardo da Vinci's drawings".

John Carey made Golding human with such ordinary but intimate details, and tales of Golding's vulnerability were very moving.

Carey - an emeritus professor and author of William Golding: the Man who wrote Lord of the Flies - read his lecture with a slight, aristocratic-like lisp, looking every inch an Oxford don - upright carriage, stiff collar, bony, brainy forehead.

His old-school focus on Golding's parents was illuminating: Golding found that his socialist parents' questioning of the Establishment was annoying, yet Golding himself "made novels out of disagreeing" as Carey put it. A satisfying hour.

Affable East London poet Charlie Dark gave a charismatic afternoon performance of his accessible, loosely-worded narrative poems of everyday life.

A great stand-up comic, Dark unabashedly pulled out every dirty trick in the entertainment book - microphone effects, harmonica, cute children on stage, audience participation, stories about his Ghanaian mother - and we lapped it up.

In Short Takes, the five writers reading from their own work all proved to be absorbing storytellers.

Sarah Laing opened with a comic and well-observed example of what she called the "Manawatu sexually-frustrated adolescence genre".

Charlotte Grimshaw's tale of three children lost in Waitakere bush shifted perspective at just the right time to keep up the tension.

Damien Wilkins' non-fiction also included danger at the beach, which he described casually and nonchalantly - a lifesaver was "a nice guy plus with skills".

Paula Morris' description of a monied New York party had political undertones, while Yiyun Li's lyrical excerpt about a woman's isolated life in Beijing was intriguing.