There are approximately three million robots working in factories around the world, and another 30 million in people’s homes. Soon robots will outnumber humans. But what happens if an autonomous AI harms or kills a person, deliberately or accidentally? It will happen. In fact, it already has. In Machines Behaving Badly, Professor Toby Walsh – Laure…

Pip Williams’ best-selling novel The Dictionary of Lost Words tells the story of motherless Esme who spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers gather words for the first Oxford English Dictionary. Over time she discovers words relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. T…

The judges for the winning 2022 Booker Prize praised Shehan Karunatilaka’s novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida for the ‘ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques’. Set in Sri Lanka during the 25- year civil war, a murdered photographer has seven days to solve the mystery of his own death. It’s a philosophical …

For children and the childlike. Britain’s 2014 Number One bestselling children’s author David Walliams brings his zany children’s tales to the Festival stage in his only Auckland appearance. With seven books, including The Boy In The Dress, Mr Stink, Gangsta Granny and Awful Auntie, Walliams has captured the imaginations of readers around the world…

UK author David Mitchell returns to the Festival following the publication of his Booker-longlisted The Bone Clocks. In this and other novels such as Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green he playfully uses realism, fantasy, time-shifts and interlocking stories to create some of the most engaging fiction around. Mitchell updates us on his writerly sojour…

The Scottish Manhattan-based actor Alan Cumming is a busy man. He has built a fine career with roles ranging from Taggart and The Good Wife on TV, to the X-Men films, and Cabaret and Macbeth on the stage. He has had a photo exhibition named “Alan Cumming Snaps!” and developed an award-winning fragrance named “Cumming”; and has been a tireless champ…

Famed Chinese writer Xinran, author of The Good Women of China, introduces her latest book Buy Me The Sky, an investigation of the impact of China’s one-child policy on those born after 1970. With journalistic nous and novelistic flair, she scrutinises how generations of “one and onlies”, burdened with expectation but reared with scant sense of res…

Daniel Mendelsohn and Anna Jackson share an enthusiam for the classics and for translation. He’s an acclaimed US memoirist, critic and translator of the Greek poet CP Cavafy; she’s a New Zealand poet whose latest collection I Clodia and Other Portraits is indebted to the scandalous Roman aristocrat Clodia, the beautiful addressee of searing and rac…

Graeme Lay and Thom Conroy have written about two figures in New Zealand’s colonial past: Captain James Cook, the inspiration for Lay’s recently completed fictional trilogy; and Ernst Dieffenbach, the free-spirited German appointed as surgeon and naturalist on the New Zealand Company’s ship “Tory”, who is at the heart of Conroy’s novel The Naturali…

For some of us the Switzerland of the South Seas is not much more than a fleeting stopover for shopping, maybe even a cocktail at Raffles. But, for Edwin Thumboo, Singapore has been home for more than eighty years, and the place where he has forged a career as a writer, academic and the country’s unofficial poet laureate. Join him in conversation w…

Poet and violinist Anna Smaill’s acclaimed debut novel The Chimes constructs a world ruled by a large musical instrument, and navigated via a musical language. It’s also a place where people are incapable of retaining memories. Bernard Beckett’s Lullaby envisages a world where memories, like body organs, can be transplanted. Futuristic, philosophic…

Playwright, novelist, poet, memoirist and blogger Renée has documented New Zealand’s social history in the latter part of the twentieth century in acclaimed work including Wednesday To Come and Setting The Table. Of Scots and Ngati Kahungunu descent, Renée blogs weekly, and publishes her new novel – a trilogy – chapter by chapter online. She talks …

Critics occupy an uncomfortable position, often finding themselves in the firing line from all sides: too harsh, too fawning, not constructive enough. But just what is the job of a critic? What value do they add? And what makes a good or a bad critic? International Shakespeare critic Peter Holland and New Zealand art critic Wystan Curnow front up f…

One of the world’s leading investigative journalists, Nick Davies broke the phone hacking story in the UK, worked with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange to publish classified material in the Guardian and has recently authored the bestselling Hack Attack. He joins New Zealand Herald columnist Toby Manhire to discuss media ethics, journalistic malpractice an…

C.K. Stead is one of New Zealand’s foremost literary figures. A distinguished novelist, literary critic, poet, essayist and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland, Stead has won many awards and fellowships. He became a Member of the Order of New Zealand in 2007, and is one of only two living writers to hold that honour. Interna…

An irreverent and stinging session should be forthcoming as Steve Braunias, author of Mad Men, and David Slack, Metro contributor, gather with writer and editor Stephen Stratford to discuss satirical writing. http://writersfestival.co.nz/assets/uploads/2015/07/NZI-L-D4-S4-Satirists-at-Large-POD-MP3.mp3…

English comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes would rather we not see “Ancient Rome as a toga party to which our invitation went astray.” An Ancient Guide to the Modern Life is her manifesto for the relevance of classics to the 21st century. In a similar vein her novel,The Amber Fury, brings teenage and Greek angst together in an Edinburgh classro…

Former Wallaby lock, newspaper columnist, broadcaster and author Peter FitzSimons joins us from Sydney to talk about his latest bookGallipoli, alongside other work including his biographies of the Second World War Two spook Nancy Wake and the authority-averse Ned Kelly. He will also expound on his “little theories of life”. The frisky FitzSimons is…

Not long ago Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri caused a stir, writing in the Guardian that black and African writers should “not be expected to write about slavery, poverty or racial injustice. The greatest literature comes not from the heaviest subjects but from freedom of thought.” Okri has written many poetry, essay and short story collections…

Atul Gawande writes profoundly about medicine. He’s a surgeon, author, researcher (with a particular interest in patient safety and care) and staff writer for The New Yorker. Being Mortal is his fourth book, and in it he wrestles as a clinician and as a son with dilemmas concerning end-of-life care. In conversation with Middlemore Hospital ICU spec…

http://writersfestival.co.nz/assets/uploads/2015/07/ASB-D4-S5-H-is-for-Hawk-Helen-Macdonald-POD-MP3.mp3 English historian, poet, naturalist and illustrator Helen Macdonald once bred hawks for Arab sheikhs. She is also the winner of the Costa Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction for H is for Hawk, a chronicle of her attempt to tame Mab…

Anthony Horowitz mines the world of spooks and gumshoes to craft great books. Creator of The Diamond Brothers, Alex Rider and The Power of Five (aka The Gatekeepers) series for younger readers, and the author of Conan Doyle estate-approved novels The House of Silkand Moriarty for grown-ups, he also writes extensively for television including for co…

“Our most irresistible literary critic,” says The New York Times Book Review. Daniel Mendelsohn is an elegant stylistic polymath – a reviewer but also an essayist, memoirist, classicial scholar and translator of the Greek poet CP Cavafy. In his memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million he excavates his family history; in his essay collection…

Tim Winton is a leading exponent of short and long form fiction. Most recently the Guardian reviewed his novel Eyrie as “a superb tale of disillusionment and redemption, loss and beauty” – a description that could equally apply to his other novels including Cloud Street, Dirt Music, The Turning and Breath. Fiction aside, Winton has written on class…

Canadian Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel Station Eleven was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Awards. In it, the world is decimated by influenza and a Shakespearean troupe with the motto “Survival is insufficient” hits the road to cheer up unlucky survivors. Exploring notions of art and kinship and the cyclical nature of life, as well as y…

Kim Thúy and her family fled Vietnam as boat people, arriving in Canada via a refugee camp when she was ten. With a previous career as a restaurateur and with degrees in law, linguistics and translation, she has now authored two poetic novels: Ru which mirrors her refugee experience and Mãn, a tale of love, homeland and identity. The vivacious and …

We’re witnessing wild times in the world of media when traditional models are beseiged by technological advances and decreasing revenues, not to mention spurned by the digital generation. Ken Auletta – “Annals of Communications” writer in The New Yorker and author of Googled: The End of the World as We Know It – is well placed to fathom it all, fro…

Clever, provocative and fun, the work of UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy is the perfect counter to anyone who would deny the allure of poetry. One of the most influential poets of the day, Duffy writes for children and adults alike, champions language and teaches English at Manchester University besides. She speaks with John Campbell about her lif…

The quest for justice has seldom been more grippingly documented than in the book This House of Grief. The Australian novelist, essayist, screenwriter and journalist Helen Garner witnessed the trial of Robert Farquharson, charged with murdering his three children by drowning. This is not her first attempt to grapple with complex issues of justice a…

New Zealand’s pre-eminent advocate, Sir Peter Williams QC, recalls the people and cases that have defined his remarkable career. Ronald Jorgensen, Arthur Allan Thomas, “Mr Asia”, James K Baxter, Winston Peters and many more will be discussed, as will his enduring commitment to justice and penal reform as canvassed in his memoirPeter Williams: The D…

Judged by The New York Times as a writer of “sharp, sparsely beautiful scenes that excitingly defy expectation” Amy Bloom is a bright light on the American literary scene and the author of three collections of short stories and three novels, the latest of which is Lucky Us. Bloom discusses her work and craft with Carole Beu. http://writersfestival.…