News from VUP

Festival madness NZ Festival Writers Week kicks off this coming Friday and we're there! Along with our book launch for Caoilinn Hughes' Gathering Evidence and Dylan Horrocks' Incomplete Works on Sat 8 March, VUP writers at the NZFWW include Eleanor Catton, Elizabeth Knox, Damien Wilkins, Geoff Cochrane, Jenny Bornholdt, Emma Martin, Danyl Mclauchlan, Ashleigh Young, Marty Smith, Harry Ricketts, and chairing sessions, Pip Adam, James Brown and Kate Camp. The programme looks terrific. Hokitika On Thursday 13 March, we head to Hokitika for 'An evening with Eleanor Catton' at Hokitika's Regent Theatre. The whole town has got behind this event, with shops being encouraged to dress up for the day! Reviews Marty Smith's Horse with Hat and Kerry Donovan Brown's Lamplighter were launched in grand style recently and both quickly received excellent reviews. Horse with Hat was no. 2 on the NZ Bestseller List late last week and a Booksellers NZ review said, 'Marty Smith’s poems are by turns quirky, sad, punchy, amusing, thought-provoking, and above all they provide a sense of time and place and family.' In NZ Listener, Louise O'Brien said 'Lamplighter is notable next for the striking and sparkling originality of the world it imagines[...] Both fairy tale and contemporary fable, Lamplighter is a lovely surprise.' We can only concur. More