RSS Amplifier

Podcast

Auckland Writers Festival

Podcast by Auckland Writers Festival

soundcloud.comSource feed ↗10 episodes

Live Last read · last published · next check

Written by

Latest episodes

Saves to your Listen queue, to pick up on another day or another device.

CALLIE HART INTERVIEW

CALLIE HART INTERVIEW by Auckland Writers Festival

Play

THE MORALITY OF AI: TOBY WALSH (2023)

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 – Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of Artificial…

Play

WORDS LOST AND FOUND: PIP WILLIAMS (2023)

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. The novel won numerous awards including the 2021…

Play

THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA: SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA (2023)

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 tale but at the heart of the novel is the horror…

Play

THE BOOK OF ROADS AND KINGDOMS: RICHARD FIDLER (2023)

The Book of Roads and Kingdoms brings to life a dazzling culture of science, literature, philosophy and adventure arising out of the flourishing metropolis of Baghdad during Islam’s Golden Age. Australian writer / broadcaster Richard Fidler recounts how medieval Persian and Arab wanderers ventured by camel, horse and boat into the unknown, bringing back tales of wonder, horror and delight. Ever…

Play

SOMETHING THAT MAY SHOCK AND DISCREDIT YOU: DANIEL LAVERY (2023)

Delightfully inventive and witty, Daniel Lavery (as Mallory Ortberg) was the cofounder of The Toast, the pop-culture platform with literary depth that described its target audience as ‘librarians’. The best-selling author of Texts from Jane Eyre and Merry Spinster, next wrote Something that May Shock and Discredit You, an exhilarating series of essays combining personal revelations with cultural…

Play

INDELIBLE CITY: LOUISA LIM (2023)

In the opening paragraphs of Stella Prize shortlisted Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, author Louisa Lim is torn between journalistic neutrality and her love of Hong Kong as she is invited by guerrilla sign painters to grab a brush and help produce pro-democracy banners. An award-winning journalist who reported from China for a decade, Lim’s first book The People’s Republic…

Play

CAN AI WRITE A BOOK? SARAH DANIELL, CATHERINE CHIDGEY, TOBY WALSH, TE TAKA KEEGAN (2023)

With open source AI chatbots capable of generating text that appears increasingly human, will they eventually replace writers altogether? Some claim that AI will never have enough creativity, empathy or originality – but over time could even these qualities be assimilated by robotwriters? Canvas editor Sarah Daniell recently experimented with getting a bot to write her column. Alongside novelist…

Play

TWO-SPIRIT: JOSHUA WHITEHEAD, ELLEN VAN NEERVEN, KŌTUKU TITIHUIA NUTTALL

Two-Spirit is a pan-Indigenous expression (FNMI – First Nations, Metis and Inuit) from Turtle Island (North America) reflecting complex understandings of gender roles, spirituality and a long history of diversity. Two-Spirit writer Joshua Whitehead (Oji-Cree member of the Peguis First Nation) took the word Indigenous and braided it with the word queer to create a new kind of worlding for his…

Play

It's Not About Hope: CHELSEA WATEGO, EMMA ESPINER

In Another Day in the Colony, Mununjali and South Sea Islander health activist Chelsea Watego has a chapter called F**k Hope. She urges her mob to be nihilistic because hope is the dream deferred, better to embrace sovereignty and take matters into your own hands. Sharing the conversation is podcaster and author Dr Emma Espiner (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou), who has an upcoming memoir There’s a…

Play