The Featherston Booktown Podcast Featherston Booktown

This week, Shane Te Pou and Phil Quin sat down with musician/teacher/local legend - Featherston’s own Warren Maxwell. Warren has made a significant contribution to music both in New Zealand and internationally as a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and a driving force behind many musical projects including Trinity Roots, Fat Freddy's Drop and Little Bushman. Warren is also a longtime friend of Featherston Booktown and a presenter at this year’s Young Reader’s Programme.https://www.bookto...

The murder of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe in their Pukekawa farmhouse in 1970 remains Aotearoa New Zealand’s most famous cold case. It spawned two trials, two appeals, a Royal commission finding of police corruption and a free pardon, and still the killer has not been found. Journalists Kirsty Johnston and James Hollings conducted their own investigation in their new book The Crewe Murders.Kirsty talks to Shane Te Pou and Phil Quin about the infamous murder case and the state of journalism tod...

Dame Susan Elizabeth Anne Devoy is a New Zealand former squash player and senior public servant. As a squash player, she was dominant in the late 1980s and early 1990s, winning the World Open on four occasions. She served as New Zealand's Race Relations Commissioner from 2013 to 2018. Her new book ‘Dame Susy D’ is out now from Allen & Unwin.Dame Susan is the Guest Speaker for the Fish’n’Chip Supper at the Featherston Booktown Karukatea Festival. On this episode, she joins Shane Te Pou and...

As a word, “activism” is only about 100 years old – yet activists and movements for change have become a regular feature of social, civic, and political life in the 21st century. However, activism is about human beings motivating and confronting other human beings to change, thereby being a fundamental human activity. Four prominent Aotearoa New Zealand activists, Denis O’Reilly, Dame Catherine Healy, Liz Mellish and Shaneel Lal share their absorbing personal and political journeys of words a...

Catherine Chidgey has been one of this country's leading fiction writers for a quarter of a century, producing novels that are both provocative and sublime, starting with In a Fishbone Church and including two novels set in Nazi Germany. Her Ockham Book Awards shortlisted book The Axeman's Carnival, has astonished readers with its magpie narrator and been called a 'Kiwi Gothic classic'. She has been awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, the Glenn Schaeffer Prize in Modern Letters...

Pasifika voices are among the most powerful in Aotearoa's New Zealand literary scene – original, provocative, funny, uplifting and heart-breaking. Four leading Pasifika writers – Victor Rodger, Nafanua Purcell Kersel, Tusiata Avia and Gina Cole – came together to at the Featherston Booktown Karukatea Festival in May 2023 read their own work and riff with host Makerita Urale.This audio and video of this event was recorded by Toby Mills from Noise Productions.https://www.booktown.org.nz/