Latest news with #Featherston
RNZ News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Booktowns saving towns: Peter Biggs
Arts and culture can help revitalise a once prosperous town - Featherston, Aotearoa's only Booktown and one of 23 worldwide, is the living proof. The Featherston Booktown Karuakatea Festival started a decade ago and takes place every year in Wairarapa over the second weekend in May, with lots of events and scores of authors. The founder and chair of Featherston Booktown, Peter Biggs, has just been elected President of the International Association of Booktowns. Featherston Booktown Festival 2023. Photo: © Pete Monk
RNZ News
18-05-2025
- RNZ News
One arrested after gunshot reports in Featherston
Photo: RNZ / Nate McKinnon A person has been taken into custody after reports of a gun being shot on a street in the Wairarapa town of Featherston. Police were called to Fox Street just before 10am on Sunday. A police spokesperson said no one was injured and they were making enquiries. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Norwegian culture, heritage and woodstacking with bestselling author Lars Mytting
This audio is not downloadable due to copyright restrictions. In the 1860s and 70s two Norwegian settlements were established in the lower North Island. As the name of one of those today suggests - Norsewood - Norwegians were invited to settle here to clear a huge swathe of forest known as Seventy Mile Bush. Which makes the arrival of Norwegian novelist Lars Mytting this weekend down the road at Wairarapa book festival Booktown in Featherston rather apt. He's there also ahead of literary events in Christchurch and Auckland. Mytting is still best known internationally for his 2015 non-fiction book Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way . Considered one of that region's greatest publishing successes - as you read it, you really can smell the freshly-cut wood. But Lars Mytting is principally a novelist. And since Norwegian Wood he has published a remarkable historical fiction series The Sister Bells Trilogy . Set in a remote valley in central Norway, the three novels tell the story of a small farming community and take place over three generations - from the 1880s through until the end of the second world war. The novels track the tension between long-held ways of living and modernisation, and between Norwegian culture and the influence of others. The Sister Bells Trilogy has been enormously successful in Norway - 400,000 copies sold, it's said, in a country with the population of New Zealand. The books have also been acclaimed internationally, and the last of the three books The Night of the Scourge has just been published in English translation. Lars is speaking in events at Auckland Writers Festival May 16, 17 and 18 and in a Word Christchurch event May 21.
RNZ News
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Norwegian culture, heritage and woodstacking
In the 1860s and 70s two Norwegian settlements were established in the lower North Island. As the name of one of those today suggests - Norsewood - Norwegians were invited to settle here to clear a huge swathe of forest known as Seventy Mile Bush. Which makes the arrival of Norwegian novelist Lars Mytting this weekend diown the road at Wairarapa book festival Booktown in Featherston rather apt. He's there also ahead of literary events in Christchurch and Auckland. Mytting is still best known internationally for his 2015 non-fiction book Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way. Considered one of that region's greatest publishing successes - as you read it, you really can smell the freshly-cut wood. But Lars Mytting is principally a novelist. And since Norwegian Wood he has published a remarkable historical fiction series The Sister Bells Trilogy. Set in a remote valley in central Norway, the three novels tell the story of a small farming community and take place over three generations - from the 1880s through until the end of the second world war. The novels track the tension between long-held ways of living and modernisation, and between Norwegian culture and the influence of others. The Sister Bells Trilogy has been enormously successful in Norway - 400,000 copies sold, it's said, in a country with the population of New Zealand. The books have also been acclaimed internationally, and the last of the three books The Night of the Scourge has just been published in English translation. Lars is speaking in events at Auckland Writers Festival May 16, 17 and 18 and in a Word Christchurch event May 21.
