Books & Writers Weekend - Details Friday Night

FRIDAY 10 SEPTEMBER

7.00pm Powhiri

7.30–7.50pm The Curnow Reader

Jenny Bornholdt, one of New Zealand’s best-loved poets, is this year’s Curnow Reader. Jenny will ready from her work.

This annual session is named in honour of the late Allen Curnow. Our continuing thanks to Jeny Curnow.

Jenny Bornholdt

Poet Jenny Bornholdt is halfway through her year as Writer in Residence at Victoria University. She has been reading about memory and forgetting and has written some poems around these ideas. Since beginning to write seriously in 1984, Jenny has published nine collections of poems, including This Big Face (VUP, 1988) and Miss New Zealand: Selected Poems (VUP, 1997).

7.50–8.30pm Right Word, Right Place, Right Time

Dame Anne Salmond addresses the theme of the weekend in this year’s keynote address. Through her writing Anne’s rich insights help us better understand ourselves, where we have come from and the issues facing us today.

Dame Anne Salmond

Dame Anne Salmond is a distinguished professor at The University of Auckland. One of New Zealand’s most prominent anthropologists and historians, Anne’s works include the award-winning Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and European, Between Worlds: Early Meetings Between Maori and Europeans, and The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas. Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti was a Times Higher Education Book of the Week and has been shortlisted for the 2010 New Zealand Post Awards.  She received the CBE for services to literature and the Maori people in 1988 and was made Dame Commander of the British Empire for services to New Zealand history in 1995. In 2009, she was elected as a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) for her excellence in scientific research.

8.30pm: An Enigmatic Presence – A Tribute to JC Sturm 1927-2009

Witi Ihimaera wrote in the NZ Listener almost 20 years ago that: “Any assessment of the post-war Maori literary movement would have to include JC Sturm … the enigmatic presence among us”. Going West screens passages from the documentary Broken Journey: The Life and Art of JC Sturm and pays tribute to the life and work of this important poet and short story writer. In honouring Jacqui, Roger Steele (publisher of Dedication, her first poetry collection) and Paul Millar, leading authority on her work, share memories of their friendship and publishing her poems. Writer, researcher and teacher of Maori and Pacific literature, Reina Whaitiri is a long-term admirer and teacher of Jacqui’s work. Reina reads from a selection of Jacqui’s poems.

JC Sturm

JC Sturm, wife of poet James K. Baxter, was one of the first Maori women to obtain a university degree in 1949. Her short stories featured in select journals throughout the 1950s and 60s. She went on to produce collections of poetry, and her writing featured in key journals and anthologies. One of New Zealand's first published Maori women writers, JC Sturm died at the age of 82 in late 2009.

In the 2007 documentary, Broken Journey: The Life and Art of JC Sturm, the author – then aged 80 – reflects on her life and the influences that shaped her writing including her early years in the Taranaki coastal town of Opunake as well as the impact of her local pa, Parihaka. Director Tim Rose describes the hour-long documentary as “an intimate story of a long, well-lived life”. As Jacqui tells the story of her life, the accompanying narration in Maori paints the picture of parallel events in New Zealand society – the depression and the war; urbanisation; the changing role of Maori women; and Maori women in literature.

Roger Steele
Roger Steele had a life before he became a publisher, which all came about because he tripped over unpublished treasure by Hone Tuwhare and JC Sturm and innocently commented "Someone should publish this!". Three hundred books later (one third poetry, a third history, and a third "What was that about?") he is trying to get his life back. But a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou, and he carries on publishing 40 books a year — the woods are lovely, dark and deep, but he has promises to keep...

Paul Millar
Paul Millar is an Associate Professor teaching New Zealand and Australian literature and the modern novel at The University of Canterbury. He has published extensively on James K. Baxter and probably knows more about Baxter’s life and art than many people would consider useful. Recently he branched out into writing biographies of other major 20th century New Zealand literary figures. He is also director of the University’s Humanities Computing Unit where he’s looking at new ways of bringing New Zealand history, literature and culture to a broad audience.

Reina Whaitiri
Reina Whaitiri of Kaitahu is a writer, researcher and a tireless supporter of Pacific and Maori literature in particular Maori women's poetry and the literature of indigenous peoples, especially that of Hawai'i. She was a senior tutor for 15 years at The University of Auckland where she taught English literature and co-ordinated a programme for those wanting to return to formal study. Before retiring in 2008, she was an assistant professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa for four years.

You can download a PDF of the Friday night programme by clicking on the attachment below.