Reviewed by Peter, Room 3 student.

Recently many lucky Heaton students got to spend an hour in the library, Te Kāmata with the world-renowned NZ author Des Hunt. We heard his story of how he became the author we all know today. His presentation was fascinating as he mixed elements of chemistry, physics, history, and audience participation into his main message about how to write a great story.

Des Hunt has spent a lot of time writing books about New Zealanders, for New Zealanders. Although he is famous for this, it is not nearly all he is good at, not even close as he also has been a teacher for a long time before starting fiction-writing, teaching all sorts of things from physics to electronics. From a young age he was interested in books of all types, and so at the ripe age of 61 and after a long journey of many, many rejections and much learning about how storytelling works, Des gravitated towards writing and it became his job after leaving teaching.

His presentation was made all the more interesting with Des demonstrating models, making comparisons, using metaphors, and lastly displaying the interesting side of science. These included a magnet-powered catapult, a floating lump of string-confetti hybrid, and a pseudo lighter gun that shot a ball over everyone’s heads and across the room!

He talked about the birds around New Zealand briefly and he shared his life experience growing up during the 1940s and 50s, into the roaring 70s and up to today. His speech was extremely entertaining yet also inspiring and I for one learned a fair bit about writing, plus other things including the art of how to learn something, as well as the importance of persistence and ambition.

I believe that we all loved our time with Des and I really do hope that more authors like him decide to pay a visit to our school.