The Mansfield Legacy - Pukapuka Talks - Nelson Arts Festival: CANCELLED

Airini Beautrais and Charlotte Grimshaw have both won awards for their short story collections. Hear from them about the attractions and challenges of the format.

Short story collections have won the top fiction prize in the New Zealand Book Awards only twice; Bug Week in 2021 and Opportunity in 2008. This year’s award winner Airini Beautrais joins former winner Charlotte Grimshaw to discuss the freedom of the form to give vivid insights into a diverse range of lives through multiple narrators.

Beautrais’ Bug Week is a scalpel-clean examination of male entitlement, a dissection of death, an agar plate of mundanity that traverses the weird, the wry and the grotesque.

Grimshaw’s Opportunity is a book about storytelling, about generosity and opportunism; above all it is a celebration of the subtleties of human impulses, of what Katherine Mansfield called ‘the LIFE of life’. Chaired by Jacquetta Bell, QSM.

Thanks to Victoria University Press and Penguin Books NZ.

Tickets $13 - $19 plus service fees
Eligible for 5 for $75