Festival signs up best-selling writer

WRITE STUFF: Audrey Niffenegger has been added to the bill for Wellington's biennial Writers and Readers Week.

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The author of the best-selling novel The Time Traveller's Wife has been added to the bill for Wellington's biennial Writers and Readers Week.

Audrey Niffenegger's 2003 debut sold 1.3 million copies, inspired a Hollywood movie of the same name and prompted a bidding war for her second novel that netted her nearly US$5 million (NZ$8.4m).

The American writer, who is also an artist and an academic, found further success with that second book, Her Fearful Symmetry, which featured on bestseller lists last year.

She will take part in the opening night of the Writers and Readers week, which runs from March 9 to 14 and is part of the New Zealand International Arts Festival.

Other authors to feature in the first session are Neil Cross, Kamila Shamsie, Gil Adamson and Chloe Hooper.

It was also announced last night that British writer Philip Hoare, who won the prestigious NZ$45,000 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction last year, will be taking part in the week.

His book Leviathan followed eight years of research into a subject dear to New Zealanders' hearts - whales. Judges said his prose was "dream-like and rises to the condition of literature".

The pair join already announced writers and thinkers Simon Schama, Neil Gaiman, Peter Singer and Richard Dawkins at the festival.

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