WORD Christchurch 2022 is back with renewed energy after a wonderful summer break and have the dates for this year’s 25th birthday festival.

31 AUGUST – 4 SEPTEMBER 2022

Stay tuned as the programme unfolds, and we work to bring you the best of New Zealand and international books, storytelling and ideas. Yes, there will still be challenges ahead, but after 25 years, and the ups and downs of 2021, we feel like we’re ready for anything (famous last words? Most definitely not!).

Catch WORD Christchurch 2021 podcasts on Radio NZ

Thanks to our friends at Smart Talk, a number of events from our 2021 festival are being broadcast on Radio New Zealand on Tuesdays at 9pm and Sundays at 4pm. Tune in each week, or listen to everything broadcast so far via the Smart Talk page.

First up is The Margaret Mahy Memorial Lecture, presented by Lyttelton poet Ben Brown. Storytelling, words, imagination are all concepts linked in the Western World to the idea of literacy. In his ground-breaking lecture, Ben Brown reconsiders these ideas from the standpoint of the oral culture of Māori life before contact with European settlers. Weaving together intensely personal memories of childhood, Brown explores what storytelling means to him now as a writer and poet.

You can also listen to

• Remembering Helen Kelly, with Rebecca Macfee and Jo Malcolm
• She is not your rehab, with Matt and Sarah Brown, in conversation with Phil Borell
• Ian Rakin: Live from Edinburgh
• After the Tampa, with Abbas Nazari and Helen Clark

We’ve extended our livestream broadcasts!

We’ve listened to your feedback about how much you enjoyed watching the Festival sessions over the summer, and that you know others who would like to watch them, too. So, we’ve reinstated all our on-demand recordings. Existing ticket holders can once more watch their sessions on the original device they used, while everyone else can pick up their digital tickets to the whole back catalogue here.

Digital tickets are pay-what-you-feel, starting from $10, and include the full day’s programming. You can also re-watch your sessions as often as you like.