13-05-2025
Featherston Booktown Karukatea Festival: A firm favourite for writers
A round-up of responses to the 2025 Featherston Booktown Karukatea Festival – the 10th birthday edition of the festival – from writers who appeared in it.
The sun shines Autumn-crisp as we wind up the Remutakas. That giant range so dense with forest, and so steep, it both awes and frightens me as we pass over it. We (my son, partner and writer Brannavan Gnanalingam) are off to Featherston Booktown Karukatea Festival for the day: both Bran and I have events at 1.30pm (me chairing a panel called The Pluck of the Irish; and Bran in a panel called Swimming Upstream: the rise of Sri Lankan writing in Aotearoa).
As soon as we slide off the mountain, pass the witchy crystal shop and cruise into Featherston proper the festival atmosphere is there in flags, and crowds and a general sense that this weekend Featherston is far busier than usual. What I love about Featherston Booktown is that you can see and feel its impact. In big cities you have to be right inside the festival venue or site to feel it, but in Featherston it's everywhere. The cafes are chokka; you can't go anywhere without spotting a writer and schools of audience members. I also love how there's buskers, food trucks and port-a-loos. To me a festival isn't really a festival without port-a-loos or some definition of flag and Featherston has both and more. They also have a delightful home baking cafe in their Anzac Hall (one of the main venues) and an ingenious set up by which audiences must walk through the booksellers' tent to both enter and exit the Hall. Very canny.
When myself, Noelle McCarthy and Dame Fiona Kidman walk up onto the stage for The Pluck of the Irish (with the delightful John Connell who was being beamed in from County Longford, Ireland) we are greeted by a sea of people. At least 200 (maybe more? My spatial maths is not great) are squished in rows of white, plastic seats – a sold-out house. The atmosphere is warm, the tech superb (John is beamed onto a big screen and the sound is perfect) and the support from the team of volunteers cheery and enthusiastic.
While I can't claim to have been to every writers festival in Aotearoa I've been to heaps and for me Featherston is one of the best. It brings its place to life and it does it with what it's got: community, enthusiasm and vision. And it makes this book festival junkie satisfied and hopeful. / Claire Mabey
As ever, Featherston delivered a festival that had all the ingredients of a big city one, with some added extras, the most unlikely people wearing their blue host pinafores, indicating a whole community coming together to celebrate books, plus, dare I say it, the slight atmosphere as one approached, of a country rodeo: music, tents, atmosphere. I loved all the packed out events, the camaraderie that lasted until I climbed on the train out of town on Sunday night. I was impressed that Rachel Boyack, Labour's shadow spokesperson for the Arts took the trouble to come from Nelson to support and listen. Three endless cheers for Mary, Biggsy and the Featherston team. It was a blast. / Dame Fiona Kidman
I love Booktown. Featherston's got that nice village-y feel; the pastries from Baker are sensational; and there always some super good combos on the programme. My personal highlights: meeting Mr Norwegian Wood, Lars Mytting, and his wife Tuva; watching Matt and Sarah Brown's children perform at the end of their This Is Not Yours to Carry session; and having the talented young Pasifika group Malaga Sā Strings provide music during our tribute to the O.G., Albert Wendt. / Victor Roger
Maybe it's because I'm writing memoir about my native 90s south and how writing was underground, dangerous, dubious work there, but Featherston, physically, hit me as really southern this time. Improbably, unnecessarily wide streets; footpaths so broad they give you existential crises. The uncanny linear geometries of woolshed and endless railway lines right up beside the chaos of massive macrocarpa the size and girth of ancient Lebanese cedars. A handpainted ad for pies, for Featherston Booktown.
And then, just over there in the endless chill and vast and freezing darkness, a classic small-town New Zealand town hall. Alight and heaving with passionate people there to talk and hear about lit. Glowing windows, far off voices and laughter in the silence, seeming somehow to levitate in an immense cold void.
The whole town's on board with it. Volunteers everywhere, tables of self-published authors lined up hawking wares outside the bookstores of Fitzherbert St. Impassioned, troubled geniuses and calm, self-contained ones. The smiling, the friendly, the yarn-haired and wild-eyed hermits, the young and the hungry, the hobbling and distinguished, roaming around looking for coffee and venues and ham, cheese and pineapple toastie pies.
Shayne Carter was there. Noelle McCarthy, glamorous and hilarious as usual, was there. Fiona Kidman. The sturdy, peacefully troubled giant and multi-million seller Lars Mytting disturbing our dreams with a reading from his memoir. There were so many more, so quickly you couldn't see them all. It felt like every session was nearly sold out. It was fast, it was densely packed, deeply local, hugely fun and often deeply moving. Highly recommended. / Carl Shuker
It was a beautifully warm and inspiring festival to be a part of. Bringing the community together to discuss books and art and ideas over great food – every town should be, and should have, a Booktown! / Stephen Mushin
Something that has always impressed me about Featherston Booktown is how ambitious it is, from the authors and speakers it invites to the number of events it squeezes into a single weekend. This year's festival was no exception, clearly the rapturous culmination of 10 years of community-building and dreaming big.
One of the volunteers told me about people who travel from as far as Auckland and even Australia to attend, which is a ringing endorsement for any festival, literary or otherwise. As a writer, I feel very fortunate for the invitations to participate in Featherston Booktown – all my visits have been memorable and I've loved getting to share my work and appear on stage alongside some of my literary heroes.
I loved the conversation between Pip Adam and Saraid de Silva about the realities of being a working writer and the uncertainty that follows us around. The glitz and glamour of a festival certainly builds excitement and attention for our books and writers, but so much needs to be done to ensure that we can support writers and other artists to create work to showcase at future festivals. / Chris Tse
This was my first time at Featherston Booktown as a punter or presenter and I was surprised – surprised by its size – with 90 presenters over a weekend. There were three other sessions at the same time as the panel I was part of, including a stellar line-up discussing Colonisation and Decolonisation to a sold-out crowd of 400, so we were thrilled to still have 80-90 attendees, and if that isn't proof enough of the fantastic turnout – the volunteer fire brigade were rumoured to have run out of food on Sunday.
Surprised at the whole community feel – the plethora of blue-aproned volunteers (including the ex-principal of our children's Rotorua primary school) who ran everything seamlessly even while pausing to analyse the books discussed in a previous session; the incredible 'spread' and birthday cake for Gala night; the white tablecloth morning tea (admittedly I saw this only on Facebook); the drinks for writers laid on at the Royal Oak; and even Book Voucher Monday where school children got to choose a free book. All in all I just hadn't realised the wholesome, interested, intelligent vibe of Featherston Booktown – a truly Wairarapa experience. / Claire Baylis
Friday morning, too early. Turning Eve into Kamikaze from How to Train Your Dragon with black facepaint and a Swanndri. Teasing her hair before coffee, it could have gone either way. All the Featherston schools are having Come As Your Favourite Character day.
Saturday. It's never sunny. It was sunny. Mary and Biggsy everywhere, the same big smiles, blue aprons, white puffs of hair. The booksellers tent: jammers. So much resin jewellery. People who love writers festivals have a certain look. Sharleen with her pūkeko picture books, a large ceramic swamp hen in the middle of the table, its belly full of chocolate fish for every passing kid. She was giving away feijoas and walnuts from the garden as well. Our Irish panel. Fairy lights in the big hall, hundreds of people on white plastic garden chairs. Dame Fiona Kidman sharing milking stories with a man on a Zoom from County Longford. All of John's extended family jammed into a corner of the tea room afterwards. Talking, talking, talking. The feeling: one home here and one home there.
Saturday night, standing on my own outside the Anzac Hall, listening to the Malaga Sā quartet, school-kids on violins and violas, Pacific interpretations of the classical traditions. Their strings are a prayer, floating out across the empty school. St Teresa's where Eve goes, the paint from the crossing gleaming white in the dark like teeth. I have my black eyeliner on still, from standing in The Dickensian this morning, confessing a teenage vampire crush to a roomful of ardent, scone-eating Goths.
Penny from the library walks by; Penny who knows every child in this place. I tell her about Eve meeting Sally Sutton of Mini-Wings fame, the photo I took of them at Chicken and Frog last night; Eve grinning like she's won something, still wearing her raccoon-eye makeup. The cold from our breaths is puffing white. It might frost overnight. The moon is nearly full. They're painting a mural on the front of the Bakehouse co-working space up on Wakefield, everyone can join in. I saw them still out in the dark when I drove by. A girl with loose blonde hair and a man in paint-stained pants. A black dog on the lawn beside them. You could see the outline of the mural in the car headlights: big pale flowers with purple faces against an orange background, curling and twining like something from Alice in Wonderland.
Inside the Anzac Hall they're putting out the cakes, the slices, metal bowls of whipped cream with spoons sticking straight up in them. Wheeling the laden trestle tables from Mitre 10 out into the hall from the tearoom. Manaakitanga. Funsize Mars bars in the green room, someone's spray painted WHAREPAKU on the outhouse door.
We do our readings. Shayne Carter's pandemic diary all swagger and heart, how music and creativity is the best first line of defence. Carl Shuker kills. He reads the passage from A Mistake where the patient dies. Tough act to follow. Selina Tusitala rises to it. An ode to getting stoned with Sam Hunt.
It is poets, always poets. And writers and readers and waiata and strings. More than that, it is Booktown. Our town. Cheryl's blue fingers after two days of workshops. The mini fell chug chugging. $3 sausages for the Fire Service, wrapped in kitchen towels. The tiny library Jess made and hung up outside The Baker. One of the books is called Nice Things About Pae Tū Mokai: 'You can always find a car park.' 'The staff at Langs work so hard to remember your name.'
Dave in his top hat, waiting for me outside The Dickensian. Patsy's scones. The little Goths who had a birthday party at my Dracula presentation, the birthday girl take-your-breath-away beautiful in her velvet bow and black veil, blowing out 18 black candles on her black cake. John, helping me out, reading Jonathan Harker's diary in a red cravat. Gary and Melissa taking Paddy Gower and Matt Heath to the RSA. Joy Cowley in a fuzzy jumper and crucifix on the big screen in the Anzac Hall at the Gala. She said 'Booktown, you're in my heart.'
Sunday, the last day. Mrs Wishy Washy tacked up in the playground gate. Eve jumps on the flying fox, hits the bank of raggedy tyres at the end of the line, soars up for a second, past the copper- leafed oaks into the Featherston blue-sky afternoon. An hour earlier, hustling me into my shoes, my coat: 'Come on Mama hurry, it's Booktown!' / Noelle McCarthy
