DUNEDIN WRITERS SALON

By Damien Gibson | Posted:

If you’re keen to hear some of Dunedin’s newest stories, then you might want to pop along to the Dunedin’s Writers’ Salon. 

Convened by the local branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors, the Salon meets on the second Monday evening of each month at Thistle in the Octagon. Some gather for a quick bite to eat at 6 pm, and from 7 pm writers read works in progress and published pieces, whether it be short stories, poetry, or excerpts from longer works of fiction and non fiction. Every month provides the opportunity to hear an altogether different line up of writers.

In October, award winning novelist Laurence Fearnley read an excerpt from Going Up Is Easy, which she co-wrote with Lydia Bradey, the only New Zealander to have made an oxygen free ascent of Mount Everest. Going Up is Easy details for the first time the events surrounding Bradey's historic feat, as well as her many hair-raising expeditions through Alaska, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, India, China, Europe, and New Zealand. 

The second writer to read from her work at October's Salon was Sue Wootton, also a prize winning fiction poet and fiction writer. While Sue has given live readings of her poetry on innumerable occasions, this was the first time she has read from her prose to a live audience. Sue read from the first two chapters of the manuscript of a recently completed novel. The set up, to what (was) is surely one of the very latest novels to be written in Dunedin, was charming and funny. A doctor who is in the middle of a mid-life crisis is delighted when he receives a letter in the post offering him a contract as a cartoonist. His wife though is less than impressed when he starts disappearing into his study for days at a time. The couple have been trying to have a baby by IVF, and she thinks they have more important priorities to deal with than cartoons.

November's line-up was similarly impressive, with readers including Vincent O'Sullivan, whose long list of accomplishments as a writer include being New Zealand's poet laureate from 2013-2015. 

The next Salon will be in February 2016.