WE CAN’T NOT MENTION IT… : STEPHANIE JOHNSON, FIONA FARRELL (2023)

Auckland Writers Festival

How do fiction writers deal with Covid? Full-on or sideways? Stephanie Johnson embraces it with gusto in her new satirical novel Kind, a thriller set in lockdown, with devious plots, social blunders and superyachts. Fiona Farrell’s The Deck is set a little way into the future and borrows a motif of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron in which a small group gather to avoid contagion and pass the time telling stories. Both provide perspectives on what we have all recently endured, and together they’ll discuss with Anne Kennedy what was on their mind as they were writing. FRI, 19 MAY 2023, 4:00pm – 5:00pm, Limelight Room, Aotea Centre.