NZ Writers Festival Lecture Series - R. Priestley & E. Knox: POSTPONED

Postponed until further notice.

"Climate change grief and the importance of hope."

Talk with multi-award-winning New Zealand authors Rebecca Priestley and Elizabeth Knox about climate change grief and the importance of hope, as Priestly discusses a life influenced by Antarctica and Knox explores the notion of hope and the human imagination.

Rebecca Priestley’s book, 'Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica' tells a personal story of time spent on Earth’s most mysterious and precious frontier. The book is a poignant and relatable reminder of the complexities of our wishes and the vulnerability of our ideals. But it also reveals the strength that art and science, research and exploration can gift to us all. Rebecca Priestley discusses a life influenced by the frozen white continent.

Rebecca Priestley is an associate professor at Victoria University of Wellington and director of the university’s Centre for Science in Society. Rebecca was science columnist for the NZ Listener for six years and is the author or editor of five previous books, the most recent of which is Dispatches from Continent Seven: An Anthology of Antarctic Science (2016).

She is a winner of the Royal Society of New Zealand Science Book Prize (2009) and the Prime Minister’s Science Communication Prize (2016). In 2018 she was made a Companion of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. She has an undergraduate degree in geology, a PhD in the history of science and an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters

Elizabeth Knox will focus on the notion of hope and is there a more powerful tool than a single, human imagination? The author of thirteen novels, three novellas and a collection of essays, Elizabeth is in possession of a mind that has delivered angels to a French vineyard, turned libraries into portals to other worlds, and wracked small-town Aotearoa with a lethal mass hysteria.

Her award-winning repertoire includes; The Vintner’s Luck, Deutz Medal for Fiction in the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and the Tasmania Pacific Region Prize. It has been published in thirteen languages. Dreamhunter, the 2006 Esther Glen Medal. Dreamhunter’s sequel Dreamquake, 2007, a Michael L Printz Honor book for 2008 and named an ALA, a CCBC, Booklist, and New York Library best book. A collection of essays, The Love School won the biography and memoir section of the New Zealand Post book awards in 2009.

Mortal Fire won a NZ Post Children’s book award and was a finalist in the LA Times Book Awards. Elizabeth’s last book is a horror/science fiction, Wake. Elizabeth is an Arts Foundation Laureate and was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2002. She lives in Wellington with her husband, Fergus Barrowman, and her son, Jack.

A conversation with Rebecca and Elizabeth is in collaboration with the New Zealand Writers Festival and the University of Waikato and will be held at the Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, starting at 6.15pm. Complimentary drinks and nibbles served from 5.30pm. Free parking is available on campus via Gate 2B, Knighton Road, Hamilton.

Registration is essential, please bring your etickets with you on the night.