Literary Festival: Adam Dudding to tell father's tale at Lit Fest

Journalist and writer Adam Dudding is coming to the Whanganui Literary Festival next month. Photo/ Supplied

It's the story of "a Bohemian in a straight-jacketed society".

But while My Father's Island talks about the life of one man and one family, writer Adam Dudding hopes people relate bits of it to their own lives.

"Fathers, families, marriage, the way people treat each other. Those are the things that I was very consciously trying to look at for the universality," he says.

Dudding is coming to Whanganui in October as part of the Whanganui Literary Festival where he will be discussing his first book, a memoir about his father Robin Dudding who died in 2008.

"He was a significant figure within the relatively obscure niche that was New Zealand literature from the late 1950s to 1980s," Dudding says.

"But for me the story that I really wanted to tell was the far more universal.

"Obviously it's a very specific story [but] oddly if you get really specific the generality comes out of it."

Dudding says his father was "a Bohemian in a straight-jacketed society".

"He rejected conservatism and narrow-mindedness."

Robin Dudding was a loving parent and husband, but was also a tormented, controlling and at times cruel man, especially when he struck a point of mid-life crisis.

Piecing together the book over about three years, Dudding had his own experience of his father to draw on.

But he was also the youngest of six children so spent time canvassing family, his father's colleagues and correspondence.

Dudding says writing the book deepened his understanding of his father and revealed some secrets.

"All of that family stuff is straight from the source."

His mother was the only one who had veto right on anything in the book.

"And she changed nothing," Dudding says.

"Really, my family were supportive. They enjoyed the book. They found some parts confronting."

And surprisingly for Dudding, everyone agreed on the facts.

"We had different feelings about it, we had different interpretations of motive."

Dudding is a journalist who has won several feature-writing awards.

He won the 2016 Wintec Press Club Best Writer in New Zealand Journalism Award.

My Father's Island was longlisted for the 2017 Ockham National Book Awards and won the E.H. McCormick Best First Book Award for General Non-Fiction.

*Adam Dudding, My Father's Island - Writing Memory, is on at the Wanganui War Memorial Centre from 11.30am - 12.30pm October 8.

Tickets are available at the Royal Wanganui Opera House.