Tauranga Arts Festival: Cult Trip author Anke Richter part of Speakers Weekend

Journalist and author Anke Richter.

Tauranga Arts Festival is starting its 2023 Speakers Weekend with a flourish, thanks to a special event on October 27 with journalist and author Anke Richter, who spent a decade of her life traversing the often-dangerous world of cults.

In this new addition to the programme she will join The Spinoff’s editor-at-large Toby Manhire at 5.30pm at Books A Plenty to talk about her 2022 book, Cult Trip, which began to take shape after a chance meeting with a survivor of Auckland’s Centrepoint.

Another 10 years of sometimes labyrinthine research followed and took Richter around the world in an attempt to discover why otherwise ordinary people are attracted to a cult, then entrapped and destroyed, mistaking control and coercion for love and care.

Taking the idea for the book to her German agent, she was warned that if she pursued it she would need counselling, and a lawyer and everyone would hate her – all predictions proving true.

Richter, who lives in Christchurch and co-founded Fight Against Conspiracy Theories (Fact) during the pandemic, is a correspondent for German media who trained in Los Angeles. Journalist and film-maker David Farrier has described Richter as “one of my favourite writers, throwing herself headfirst down fascinating rabbit holes and blurring the line between participant and reporter”, while reviewers have called Cult Trip “a tour de force” and “intense and necessary reading”.

Journalist and author Anke Richter.

The festival’s Speakers Weekend is renowned for conversations you won’t hear anywhere else and while it may be hard to follow such a strong opening chapter, artistic director Shane Bosher is confident the programme not only has breadth and depth but also has heart.

“You never know what you’re going to hear,” he says. “That’s what makes a speaker programme so special. No one ever goes away less informed or less humanised.”

Weather is a topic used to break the ice at social gatherings but after the year we’ve just had it’s now a headline regular with records constantly being broken. “Emergency Emergency” (October 29, 11.30am) brings together a panel of local heroes to share ideas about the individual and collective actions we can take in Tauranga Moana in the face of the huge challenge that is climate change.

“It’s easy to look at ‘big-picture’ topics and as an individual think ‘too hard’,” Shane says, “even though most of us realise that something must be done and we have a role to play.

“We’ve put together a panel of locals who all work in the field of environmental change and protection in Tauranga Moana. These people know the problems we’re facing and have ideas about the changes we can effect – as individuals and a community – to make things better for our children and mokopuna.”

Award-winning investigative reporter Jared Savage's new book is Gangster’s Paradise.

Award-winning journalist Jared Savage [NZ Herald], who lives in Tauranga, was a hit at last year’s Escape festival talking about his book Gangland, which spotlighted the web of criminal gangs in Aotearoa.

With his new book Gangster’s Paradise hot off the press, Savage returns to reveal how gang culture has escalated in the two years since Gangland was published, a time when he wrote that New Zealand had become one of the most lucrative illicit drug markets in the world.

“Organising the Crime” (October 29, 10am) will take audience members behind the headlines to a murky world where the rise of new gangs is challenging the established order, to a world of turf wars, drugs, guns and money. Lots of money. And the men and women facing down the criminals.

• All Saturday and Sunday events are at the University of Waikato campus in Durham St, Tauranga. For more information see taurangafestival.co.nz. Tickets from Baycourt box office or Ticketek. Day passes are available.

Content supplied by Sandra Simpson on behalf of the Tauranga Arts Festival. The Bay of Plenty Times is a gold sponsor of the festival. Jared Savage is a journalist with the NZ Herald, which is owned by NZME as is the Bay of Plenty Times.