Going West Documented Reality

Going West Festival’s 26th season moves online for September, offering three freshly curated live conversations with Aotearoa’s finest writers of prose, poetry and culture.

The events, which can be accessed from the Going West Writers Festival website, are perfectly proportioned bites for lovers of books, words and ideas.

Saturday 11 September, 7.30pm
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
How does our view of the world change as we age? Does the reality ever meet our dreams? In an hour of discussion and readings, authors Charlotte Grimshaw (The Mirror Book), Lana Lopesi (False Divides), Alison Jones (This Pākehā Life: An Unsettled Memoir) and Ghazaleh Golbaksh (The Girl from Revolution Road), interrogate their lives as young woman. In conversation with Amy McDaid. 

Sunday 12 September, 7.30pm
Mark Beehre’s new book A Queer Existence is composed of beautiful and intimate portraits of queer men born after the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. Jack Remiel Cottrell’s debut book Ten Acceptable Acts of Arson features stories from his life as a queer man of that generation. Facilitated by playwright Victor Rodger, they discuss what might now be on the ‘queer agenda’ as we move through the 21st century.

Monday 13 September, 7.30pm
Multiverse
Performance poets Angela Zhang, Simone Kaho, Takunda Muzondiwa, Kyla Manalili Dela Cruz deliver a powerful poetic discourse of resistance. Muzondiwa’s TEDxYouth talk, Dear Racism, was widely acclaimed, while Kaho was recently named as Emerging Pasifika Writer in Residence at Te Herenga Waka. Curated by poets and provocateurs Aiwa Pooamorn and Gemishka Chetty, co-creators of the Fringe Festival performance Go Home Curry Muncha.