Meet Your Heroes at Family Day Dunedin  

There is no other day quite like it in Dunedin Library. It’s the day you get to meet the authors and the illustrators who made your favourite books. The Library is full of excited people, including the authors and illustrators, and the volunteers who make the day happen. There are words flying, paints flying and the hum of creativity everywhere. You get to talk to authors, draw stuff with illustrators, learn the secrets of good writing in workshops, ask questions, buy books, get the books signed by authors and illustrators and just live and breathe stories for a day. What could be better than that?

For the writers and illustrators it’s also a time to catch up with good friends who are part of the Storylines Festival. For me in Dunedin this year it will be junior fiction and picture book writer Leonie Agnew of Auckland and writer and craft expert extraordinaire Fifi Colston of Wellington. And I will meet in person for the first time a few of my heroes – young adult novelist Elizabeth Pulford and Diana Noonan who edited my very first story in School Journals in the 1990s. I’ll also get to talk to writers I have never met before – junior fiction writer Jane Bloomfield and picture book writer Scott Tulloch both of Queenstown, non-fiction nature writer Gillian Candler and Auckland children’s poet and picture book writer Elena de Roo.

But it’s not about us, it’s about you guys.

So come, please. Bring your friends and the friends of their friends. Forget sports and homework and cleaning your bedroom (which you were probably never going to do anyway) and, for one day on the weekend meet your favourite authors and illustrators. Because we would love to meet you.

Ella West, Author of Night Vision

Storylines’ Family Day Dunedin, 27th August, 11am-3pm, City Library