I wish I wrote that: Love letters to other writers at WORD Christchurch 2026

I love a literary festival but running (or in my case, biking) from one event to another is not the best at the end of a long day so it's with slightly depleted energy levels that I find a seat at The Piano for this WORD Christchurch event in which writers present a love letter to a work that has had an indelible impact on their lives.

Surprisingly for the line-up (Kehan Karunatilaka, Pip Adam, Jon Toogood, and late ring-in Grant Robertson) the auditorium is only a third full and it's to MC Lizzie Tollmache's credit that she does an excellent job of getting this smaller audience energised with some amusing and invigorating "clapping practice".

Shehan Karunatilaka and the G.O.A.T (best-selling, continued popularity)

First to the lectern is Booker Prize-winning novelist and now Ōtautahi local, Shehan Karunatilaka, who admits from the get-go that this isn't really a love letter. Indeed, it's more like stand-up routine as Karunatilaka makes a very amusing case for why The Bible is the book that he (and probably any writer) would want to have written.

Amongst his excellent points in support of this argument are:

• People are still reading it thousands of years later
• The Bible has dedicated fan Book Clubs that meet every Sunday, and there are even specific buildings dedicated to the Book Club
• It was the inspiration for hundreds of years' worth of art up to, and including, Black Sabbath
• There's so much merch - and it's got a very versatile logo.
• It's a legal code, a sex manual, AND a post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic
• It has the best opening line of all time that doesn't mess around, "In the beginning..." and ends with the extinguishing of the sun; "That's range for you!"
• It's got; David vs Goliath, a man being swallowed by a fish, a woman getting turned into salt, a talking Donkey (pre-dating Shrek by quite a bit), 
• You don't actually have to write it, you just breathe the words into various people.
• "If someone doesn't like it I can quite literally tell them to go to Hell!"
• The messages in it; love your neighbour, care for the sick and weak, live lives of compassion

But if Karunatilaka could meet the author there are 3 things he would ask, and they are very much the concerns of a mortal writer and not those of a deity:

1. Who's your agent?
2. How much was the advance?
3. In which century do the royalties start rolling in?

Jon Toogood and the "deceptively simple" music of Aldous Harding

Jon Toogood, Lizzie Tollemache informs us, has performed more than 1500 shows. And there's a long and comprehensive list of gold records and chart-topping. But as someone who came to adulthood in the early 90s I am very familiar with Toogood's musical career with Shihad (latterly Pacifier). I have not as yet got my hands on his memoir, Home Again, but am keen.

Being a veteran performer, Toogood recognises that he's got a hard job following Karunatilaka's rapid-fire comedy routine so is almost apologetic when he says he's "taken it quite seriously".

Toogood first saw and heard indie folk singer-songwriter Aldous Harding when she appeared on Later... with Jools Holland. He subsequently "rushed out and bought, Party", an album that has some of his favourite New Zealand songs of all time. He describes Harding's music as confronting, colourful and complex, new and real, and "deceptively simple". Her next album, Designer, features the song "The Barrel" and includes the lyric: "Look at all the peaches", and for the first year of his daughter's life, "Peaches" was her nickname in reference to that song.

"Aldous," he says, "has a way with words that speak deep truths".

Something in this is "the most straightforward way of saying f**k you, to The Man.... Surrealism and a sense of wonder might be the biggest f**k you of all."

Toogood is clearly touched - "I feel good about being human when I listen to Aldous's music".

And then he talks about the song, Treasure, off the album, Party. 

I am not musically inclined enough to really understand what Toogood means when he talks about the choices in chord changes - an A minor that shifts to A major at one point in the song and one point only: "... like being given your favourite lolly as a kid... but only one." For him, it "jumps out of the canvas of the song".

And then we all listen to it together, Toogood introducing it with "I love this song", slightly bobbing his head as it plays, signally that chord change to us and then simply finishing with a "yay, Aldous".

pip adam and Robin Hyde's grim novel

Pip adam has won every literary award going in Aotearoa, it seems like and so it's not a great shock that this Kiwi novelist would choose a Kiwi novel as the work they feel envy/love for. Adam describe's Wednesday's Children by Robin Hyde as a "strange and sad book". A book that "haunts" her with its "dark and grim" outlook.

Its theme? Sometimes it is hard to live here.

Written and set in 1930s New Zealand, the novel follows Wednesday Gilfillan, an independent, unmarried woman who rejects societal expectations, raising her children on an isolated island. Adam calls Hyde's novel with its portrayal of poverty "profound and prescient", evoking Ruth Richardson's New Zealand still 50 years in the future. The content, though grim, is written in a "rollicking satirical style":

"It reads like trying to laugh through the absolute agony of trying to live.... It is sadder and more heartbreaking than any book I can think of."

It's not without its issues, and reflects "the racism at the core of 1930s New Zealand... in places it's an impossible book to defend". In so doing it's an "antidote to the delusion that New Zealand is not a racist country". But it also "seems to understand more deeply who this land belongs to and who does the work".

There is also a twist that adam says, "makes it impossible not to talk about". But I'm of two minds as to whether to recount that here. Adam thinks knowing the twist makes it a better read of what she calls a "foundational work of social realism". I think I'd rather leave it an intriguing mystery which the reader can investigate for themselves.

Grant Robertson and the Dunedin Sound

I once attended an Auckland Pride Parade after party at which the then Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson, was on the decks DJing. So perhaps it shouldn't have been a massive surprise to learn that Robertson's love letter would be musical in nature. That he couldn't keep himself to a single song but chose FIVE wasn't as predictable. Indeed, his is a "love letter from a musical sl*t".

Indeed.

Robertson paints a picture of Dunedin in the 1980s but also Robertson in the 1980s  - bespectacled, 13 years old, going to gigs where the music was "raw, real, revelatory". This was not his parents' World Music Club subscription. This music was something else entirely and he was just the right age to fall, and fall hard.

He describes seeing The Chills perform, and their "dreamy, stargazing boy wonder" frontman, Martin Phillipps. The jangly chords of Straitjacket fits. The surprising discovery via the band Look Blue Go Purple that "some musos are girls?!"

Later, in 1991, by this stage flatting in Castle St he reminisces about going to a Verlaines gig, "we pre-loaded then we got there and we just loaded". It was ever thus.

Dunedin, the compact city where everything is only 10 minutes away, including, says Robertson, "the best music in the world".

He ends with a recollection of seeing The Clean perform, again, in 1991 with Martin Phillipps on keyboard and this is when we all listen together to Tally Ho! Everyone, audience and writers, nodding their heads along, me tapping my pen on my notebook like a very weak one-woman rhythm section.

Now, you said it was yesterday, yesterday's another day
Had a lot of make believe, I don't know if it's you or
If it's me oh, I don't know, I don't know
Tally ho, tally ho!

And we're off into the Christchurch night, the Dunedin Sound rattling around in our heads.

More from the writers

• Shehan Karunatilaka
• Jon Toogood
• pip adam
• Grant Robertson

WORD Christchurch

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