Guilt, murder and laughs at WORD Christchurch
Wednesday, 9 July 2025
Be ready. The signing queue went out the door and kept on going when Catherine Chidgey appeared at the Auckland Writers’ Festival in May. She was there with her new bestseller, The Book of Guilt. Expect similar scenes in Christchurch in August.
Chidgey will be back in time from the Edinburgh Festival to be hosted at WORD Christchurch, where she appears in a session chaired by her old friend, poet Kate Camp.
Chidgey is kind of international these days but Australian novelist Charlotte Wood is genuinely international. Wood will be quizzed by writer Emily Perkins about her Booker-nominated Stone Yard Devotional. She will also have a session with Chidgey about writing atmospherically and uneasily, along with journalist turned author Michelle Duff.
Speaking of writerly craft, Ockham New Zealand Book Awards winner Damien Wilkins and finalist Laurence Fearnley will be talking about their fiercely intelligent novels Delirious and At the Grand Glacier Hotel.
Is there a theme? WORD programme director Kiran Dass says it is about joy, laughter and social cohesion, but the programme features books about near-fascist social engineering, dementia, poor water quality and murder. And by murder, we mean the sensational trial of Auckland eye surgeon Philip Polkinghorne, which will be discussed in lurid detail by journalist Steve Braunias and former Christchurch mayor Lianne Dalziel. Interesting pairing.
Joy may also be absent from a sombre discussion of the state of the nation’s media, featuring RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson, Press editor Kamala Hayman and other notables.
But here is some joy and laughter. Comedian Tom Sainsbury will present a “cheeky” book discussion session with authors Kate De Goldi, Rachel Paris and Josiah Morgan. Writer Duncan Sarkies makes a similarly unserious appearance with I’d Love to Have a Beer with Duncan, in which audiences do indeed get a beer while Sarkies talks.
The brilliant Diana Wichtel will discuss Unreel, her memoir of a life spent reviewing television for the Listener magazine, with a journalist who used to work there. The great author and illustrator Gavin Bishop will also be in reflective mode, in a session chaired by Morrin Rout.
Similarly, publisher Nicola Legat will ask the venerable Dame Anne Salmond about her decades of working at the coalface of New Zealand’s cultural relations. Is there a chance David Seymour’s name will come up at least once?
In related news, WORD’s ever-popular Risky Women session returns, featuring Ali Mau, Susie Ferguson, Petra Bagust and Nici Wickes, hosted by Stacey Morrison. Mau and Ferguson will then break off into their own session about resilience and courage.
And speaking again of resilience, inspirational former Christchurch Boys’ High School speaker Jake Bailey returns to the stage in a session with Lucy Hone and Maysoon Salama, who lost her son in the Al Noor Mosque attack. You could pair it with Wilkins’ workshop on writing about grief.
While WORD is not usually known for fashion, the best-dressed session will surely be the one about Eden Hore’s Central Otago Collection, which documents how more than 200 dazzling garments from the 1970s were collected by an Otago farmer. Some of those dazzling garments will be on loan for the session.
The launch of a new edition of archaeologist Atholl Anderson’s landmark history of southern Māori, The Welcome of Strangers, closes the weekend and promises to be a major event. That is because Anderson will be joined by Ngāi Tahu historians Te Maire Tau, Michael Stevens and Helen Brown. Even better, it is one of the festival’s “pay what you can afford” sessions, as is one on Te Tiriti hosted by Roimata Smail.
WORD Christchurch runs from August 27 to 31.