Speed Date an Author information

Ever wondered what your kids could write with a bit of advice from New Zealand’s top writers?

The Book Council invites your school to host a Speed Date an Author day. Six brilliant writers will talk to five groups of up to 10 students for 20 minutes each about a key aspect of writing, with a little help at the end from a top editor on how to edit their own work. Each student will then go back to home and school and, over the next weeks, write a 500-word story based on what they learned from these writers about how to generate ideas, character, plot, scene and other elements of a story.

We ran this event in Wellington in September with Tessa Duder, Gavin Bishop, Melinda Szymanik, Maria Gill, Mandy Hager and Ruth Paul leading these “speed dating” workshops.  This is an unmissable experience for your promising writers. Each student also has the opportunity to enter their finished story into a competition, with prizes including book tokens, and books by the writers involved, as well as publication on the Book Council website.

There will be a cost per student for the event, and this will depend on the context of the event. The maximum number of students which can be involved is 50, with an age range depending on the topics covered. We wish to target promising writers with this morning workshop, which includes a half-hour break midway through.

We look forward to running this type of event again all around New Zealand - especially in association with Literary Festivals. If you are running a literary festival next year, please get in touch with Sarah Forster and we can talk about ways we could modify the format to fit your needs. Details are outlined below.

For further information, please contact Sarah Forster, E: education@bookcouncil.org.nz.
Ph: (04) 801 5546

Hamilton Speed Date An Author events, Image-based writing competition

Southwell School hosted our most recent Speed Date an Author event in Hamilton on Wednesday 20 June. The guest writers were Gretchen Brassington, Tracy Duncan, Sharon Holt, Bruce Potter, Alison Robertson and Feana Tu'akoi. The audience was 60 extremely keen intermediate-aged students, ranging in age from 10 to 13.
This event went incredibly well thanks to the support of Southwell School librarians, National Library staff, the Hamilton Public Library, and the hard work of the authors.

This Speed Date an Author event was sponsored by the Waikato Children’s Literature Association and Southwell School. Prizes are supplied by Books for Kids, Booksellers NZ, Penguin NZ, Pearson NZ, New Holland Publishers and Scholastic NZ.

The following six images are for the students who participated in the programme to focus on, when writing their story. Please click on them to see an larger version of the same image. The first, second and sixth images are copyright Tracy Duncan, the third and fourth images are copyright Bruce Potter, and the fifth image is copyright Brian Lovelock.
 

 

Speed date an author is inspiring the Manawatu region

Ross Intermediate in Palmerston North hosted the first Speed Date an Author in Manawatu, on Wednesday 16 June. This event was bustling, with 57 intermediate students from 14 schools involved in this fantastic programme. The six writers involved were  Fifi Colston, Janice Marriott, Fleur Beale, Diana Neild, David Hill and Marion Orme.

This event was generously sponsored by McKenzie Bookstore, Random House NZ, Penguin NZ, and Scholastic NZ.