SPEED DATE AN AUTHOR

By Lynette Hartgill, New Zealand Book Council | Posted:

Imagine spending four hours picking the brains of some of New Zealand’s best poets, authors, illustrators, journalists and playwrights, to inspire and develop your own skills. Sounds good?

This is precisely what the New Zealand Book Council does for schools. We call it Speed Date an Author, and it has been one of our most successful education programmes for five years. We tour six regions every year and include up to 20 schools, with as many as 90 students each time, whose ages can range between 8 and 14 years of age depending on the event.

Speed Date is so highly valued that we regularly see schools up to five hours drive away, camping on living room floors overnight, or travelling in before daybreak in order to be there for the 9.00am start time.

The creativity that is unleashed in these events is evident to anyone who has participated, but feedback, photographs and word of mouth have always fallen short of sharing the event with anyone new. New schools, new sponsors, new regions are all vital to the success of the programme. Thanks to Dunedin, and its UNESCO City of Literature status, we can now share our story more effectively, with the production of a video documenting our most recent Speed Date an Author event for the 2015 Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival. 

Speed Date an Author was first brought to Dunedin in 2013, and since then we have toured the event to the Te Papa Museum, The NZ Festival and the Festival of Colour in Wanaka. We have brought the buzz to the War Memorial Library in Lower Hutt, the Elma Turner Library in Nelson, the Baycourt Community and Arts Centre in Tauranga, and returned to Auckland, Christchurch, and Dunedin, time and again.

We shared the video with schools for the first time this August, to promote our annual return to the South Library in Christchurch. We were stunned to watch the event sell out within ten days – an entire month faster than usual. Almost half of the schools had never attended before, and we could have repeated the event twice over with the number of schools we turned away.

The impact of the video is unquestionable. It has empowered the NZ Book Council to explain the event in a way that would not have been possible without the support of the writers and schools in Dunedin that allowed themselves to be filmed, and the UNESCO City of Literature team who so generously made the concept a reality.

We are committed to sharing and supporting Dunedin’s literary heritage, its vivacious writers and illustrators, and the development of the students who will tell the City’s stories in the future.