Words count

The Going West Writers Festival lives right on the edge but somehow it never falls off. If I had a dollar for every time someone credible has told me the festival was about to die, I would have... well, I would have three whole dollars, in fact, but that’s three brushes with death in the past 10 years.

“We were questioning whether we should continue,” says programme director Nicola Strawbridge, speaking about the most recent, at the 20th Going West festival, three years ago. “Twenty years is a lovely round number, and that was the year our founding programmer retired, and it was hard to imagine the festival without him, at first. But our audience said no, look, you’ve got to keep going, and our writers told us the same, and so we did. It was a major outpouring of love; we were quite swept away by it, actually. We’ve been very lucky in the support we’ve received.”

Going West is the smallest and most idiosyncratic of the established literary festivals in any of the major cities. Its centrepiece event, the annual literary weekend in Titirangi, takes place in a single modestly