Auckland Writers Festival Creators & Guests

Helen Macdonald is a writer, naturalist, and an Affiliated Research Scholar at the University of Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

Charles Graeber is a freelance medical journalist and author. He is best known for his first book, "The Good Nurse," which was adapted into a drama for Netflix in 2022.Before becoming a journalist and author, Graeber was a medical student and researcher, and he co-authored papers for scientific journals. Graeber's work has appeared in Wired, GQ, The New Yorker, Outside, and The New York Times. His first book, "The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder," was published in 2013. His second book, "The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer," was published in 2018.

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.Roy is best known for her first novel, "The God of Small Things," which was published in 1997, and which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author.

Ben Okri is a poet and novelist, and one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions.Okri's first book, "Flowers and Shadows," was published in 1980. He became the poetry editor at West Africa magazine, and regularly appeared on the BBC World Service.Okri was born in Minna in west central Nigeria, and is a member of the Urhobo people. In 1978, he moved to England to study comparative literature at Essex University.