Santa News from Auckland Readers & Writer's Festival

The latest Auckland Readers & Writers Festival newsletter is out announcing lots of fantastic guests for the May event. And tickets don't go on sale until April so there is plenty of time for your budget to recover from the festive season. However, if you want to buy a subscription as a gift there is still just enough time for Santa to get it under the tree.

Here's an excerpt from the bulletin announcing the lineup to date:

The Auckland Writers & Readers Festival is proud to announce that the following international guests will appear at the 2010 festival:
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love. The sequel, Committed, is a meditation on the history, culture, politics, trials and tribulations of marriage.
John Carey is a distinguished critic, reviewer, broadcaster, Man Booker judge, and biographer of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding.
Rick Gekoski, bestselling author of Tolkien’s Gown, takes us on a literary journey in his bibliomemoir Outside of a Dog.
The prolific and much-loved Thomas Keneally’s most recent novel is The People’s Train. He has just published the first in a three-volume history of the Australian people, Australians: Origins to Eureka.
In Seven Days in the Art World sociologist Sarah Thornton looks at all aspects of buying, selling, and creating serious art.
Jill Dawson’s sixth novel, The Great Lover, is a fictional life of Rupert Brooke.
Yiyun Li’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and won the Guardian First Book Award. Her new novel, The Vagrants, is based on the true story of a young woman sentenced to death in 1979 China for her loss of faith in Communism.
Su Tong won the 2009 Man Asia Literary Prize for The Boat to Redemption. A major figure in China’s literary scene, his best-known work is Wives and Concubines, which was made into the film Raise the Red Lantern.
Independent journalist and blogger Antony Loewenstein writes about the internet in The Blogging Revolution and the Israel/Palestine conflict in his bestselling My Israel Question.
Ben Naparstek, the 23-year-old editor of Australia’s influential magazine, The Monthly, recently published In Conversation, a collection of interviews with 39 of the world’s best writers.
John Freeman, the new editor of Granta, explores the history of communication in Shrinking the World: The 4,000-year story of how email came to rule our lives.
Adrian Wooldridge, management editor of The Economist, joins us to talk about his latest book (co-authored with John Micklethwait, The Economist’s editor-in-chief), God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World.
More guests, including New Zealand writers, will be announced in February 2010. Final programme details will be released in March and tickets go on sale through The Edge Ticketing Service in April.