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NZ Book Council WordSpace series – Playwriting

DATE: Wednesday 17 August, 2005
TIME: 11.30am – 12.30pm

Join Bernard Beckett, Lynda Chanwai-Earle and Hone Kouka in discussion about playwriting. The WordSpace series is brought to you in partnership with the NZ Book Council.

About the writers

A high school teacher with a particular love for writing plays and teaching drama, film and outdoor education, Bernard Beckett was brought up in Masterton and now lives in Wellington. He has published six novels for young adults – Lester (1999), Red Cliff (2000), Jolt (2002), No Alarms (2002), Home Boys (2003) and Malcolm and Juliet (2004) which won the Young Adult Fiction Category of the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults 2005. He has also written a book of plays, 3 Plays: Puck, Plan 10 from Outer Space, The End of the World As We Know It (2003).

Lynda Chanwai-Earle is a poet, multi-media performance artist, playwright and television journalist. In 1998, her play Ka-Shue (Letters Home) was New Zealand's first contemporary theatre piece about the Chinese community. Lynda's Fire Mountain (Foh-Sarn), a play about young and new immigrant Asians premiered at Auckland's Herald Theatre in 2000, and Lynda's next play Monkey premiered with the International Arts Festival in 2004, and toured to Auckland for a season. This year her commission for Circa Theatre, Heat goes into production. She has published a collection of her own poems, honeypants (1994), as well as the anthology No Flowers: Writing by Women Imprisoned (1997), a collection of poetry by women she worked with at Arohata Women's Prison that she worked with.

Hone Kouka Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Kahungunu, achieved early recognition with his plays on Māori themes as the youngest playwright to win the Bruce Mason Award (for Hide 'n' Seek, with Hori Ahipene, 1992). He is also a short fiction writer, poet, children's writer and actor, and has worked as a theatre artistic director and in journalism, sawmilling and forestry. He graduated in English from University of Otago 1988 and from Toi Whakaari / New Zealand Drama School in 1990. After Mauri Tu, Hide 'n' Seek and Five Angels, he collaborated with director Colin McColl in the popularly successful Ngā Tangata Toa, performed in Wellington and Auckland 1995. Waiora Te U Kai Po (The Homeland) was commissioned for the 1996 New Zealand International Festival of the Arts. It was revised for a national and international tour, and published with an introduction by Roma Potiki and afterword by Judith Dale in 1997.

TO REGISTER FOR THIS VIDEO-CONFERENCE, CONTACT digitalconversations@cwa.co.nz BY MONDAY 15 AUGUST, 2005.
Telephone: (04) 382 6506.

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