1. Is this new book the most political work you have done?

For acclaimed Kiwi Pacific author Albert Wendt, writing is like breathing.

He's exhibited his work at the prestigious Venice Biennale, become a YouTube sensation, and now New York-based Kiwi kinetic artist Joseph Herscher has been invited to exhibit his works on one of America's most famous boulevards - Sesame Street.

It is never difficult to find contemporary events that point to the relevance of Titus Andronicus, but Shakespeare's reflections on the extremes of human cruelty are given particular poignancy by the recent murder of a young soldier on a London str

Bill Culbert, New Zealand's artist for the 2013 Venice Biennale.

Did you always think the name Nigel was a bit of a liability?

I feel privileged and honoured. The recurring fear is: Have I wasted my life writing?

The final day of the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival was bookended by standing ovations for two of New Zealand's ground-breaking writers of the past 50 years.

The big issue with writers' festivals is that you can't be at three or four events at once. So the rich array of offerings presented the ongoing dilemma of which writer to see.

Rutherfurd, whose new tome is called Paris, had an extra hour added to yesterday's Writers & Readers schedule after selling out tomorrow and recalled having to speak to a row of schoolboys scowling at him.

A painting of actress Bea Arthur topless has sold for US$1.9 million at a New York City auction.

A Jean-Michel Basquiat painting has set a new auction record for the graffiti artist at a sale of postwar and contemporary art in New York.

Patua means "to hit, kill, subdue, ill-treat", and writer-director Renae Maihi bravely takes on the subject of child abuse in the 75 nicely paced minutes of this, her second play.

The city of Auckland was named after "a dud ex-colonial mediocrity who stuffed up on a quite spectacular scale", says British historian William Dalrymple.