TelevisionThey made no compromises with their melting pot of Polynesian comedy. ‘We did it our own way,’ says creator Hanelle Harris
The last thing Hanelle Harris expected to be doing while heavily pregnant was lead an intensive three-week film shoot all over Auckland. Yet as someone whose personal motto is “dream big”, she knows dreams rarely manifest at exactly the moment you want them to.
“I think my friends are over it, aye,” Harris laughs. Read More...
Book of the dayFictionReviewBased on the real-life story of a peasant in revolutionary France, this hallucinatory tale is set to be one of the most remarkable novels of the year
AK Blakemore’s second novel is inspired by the real life story of Tarare, a showman in 18th-century France who made his living by demonstrating a prodigious ability to devour things: heaps of fruit, corks, stones, live animals, offal. Born to a peasant family, by his teens he was able to eat his own weight in meat in a day and was driven from home lest he ruin his parents. Read More...
The ObserverFictionReviewThe novelist continues her run of stories about isolated people with this intriguing but uneven tale of life after a deadly pandemic
In 2015, novelist Claire Fuller debuted with Our Endless Numbered Days, the story of a girl kidnapped by her survivalist father and raised in the wilderness, where she’s led to believe they are the only two people left alive after a nuclear apocalypse. She has gone on to create other such potently enclosed worlds in books including Bitter Orange and the Costa novel prize-winning Unsettled Ground, often using that same rural remoteness to enhance the feeling of isolation and its accompanying sense of slow-burn jeopardy. Read More...