Travels in Memory
The Meteor Theatre
1 Victoria St, Hamilton
Monday 13 August
6.30-8pm
Free event with cash bar
When an author uses her own life as source material, what extra challenges does she face? What are the pleasures of drawing from personal experience and family history, and what are the dangers? What can the exploration of memory teach us about its power and complexity? Tracey Slaughter explores key questions of life-writing in discussion with authors Catherine Chidgey, Diana Wichtel, and Vivianne Flintoff, three women whose recent acclaimed work has journeyed to the heart of the creative nonfiction form.
Catherine Chidgey’s honours include Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for her region; the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award; the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France; the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters; a Betty Trask Award (UK); and a longlisting for the Orange Prize. Her novel Golden Deeds was chosen as a book of the year by Time Out magazine (London), as well as by the New York Times Book Review and the LA Times Book Review. She has been Writer in Residence at the Universities of Canterbury, Otago and Waikato. She teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato and lives in Ngaruawahia with her husband and daughter. Her fourth novel, The Wish Child, won the $50,000 Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for 2017, and her latest book, The Beat of the Pendulum, was published in November 2017.
Diana Wichtel is an award-winning feature writer and television critic with the New Zealand Listener. She was joint recipient in 2016 of the Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship, which enabled her to write the memoir, Driving to Treblinka: A Long Search for a Lost Father, about the impact of the Holocaust on her family. The book won the Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-Fiction and the E.H. McCormick Prize for Best First Book General Non-Fiction at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Vivianne Flintoff and husband Bruce decided to take extended leave and travel to Europe to walk the pilgrimage route The Way of Saint James to Compostela: in Spanish this is the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Her book Kiwi on the Camino: A Walk that Changed My Life is the story of their 800 kilometre journey and the people they meet on the way. Vivianne's writing has been published in professional journals and in Walking New Zealand.
Our chair Tracey Slaughter is a poet and short story writer from Cambridge. Her work has received numerous awards, including the international Bridport Prize (2014), shortlistings for the Manchester Prize in both Poetry (2014) and Fiction (2015), and two Katherine Mansfield Awards. Her latest work, the short story collection deleted scenes for lovers (Victoria University Press), was published to critical acclaim in 2016. She is currently putting the finishing touches to a poetry collection titled `conventional weapons'. She teaches at the University of Waikato, where she edits the literary journal Mayhem.
Tracey Slaughter, photo credit: Catherine Chidgey.
