‘Inspiration and ideas for a new story’. That is what one student gained after attending the Books Alive workshops at Tūranga this term. 18 students ranging from Year 8-10 took up the opportunity to attend two presentations by prominent New Zealand authors.

The first author, Eileen Merrimen, talked about her journey towards becoming an author. Besides writing, Eileen is a practising doctor in Auckland who got her start writing short stories for local competitions. From these stories she gained the confidence to write more, moving on to novels and now has four published Young Adult novels. Eileen gave students some excellent advice about how to create characters and the importance of drafting and redrafting your work.

Mandy Hager, our second featured author, spoke with passion about activism and using her platform as a writer to prompt people to think and consider ‘What would I do if…’. She told us, ‘I believe that everything is political, and as such it should concern all of us. Authors who claim they don’t deal with politics in their work are being naive, because even that is a political stance’. Mandy’s books tackle issues such as climate change and water rights through dystopian settings that draw inspiration from real life events. Her messages around ‘fake news’ resonate strongly with Hornby’s current focus on critical literacy - the ability to challenge and critique information. We were certainly lucky to have a number of her books in our school library that Mandy was kind enough to sign after she finished speaking.

Discussions with students who attended these two sessions were very positive. There were those who found the first speaker most engaging, whilst others felt motivated to take their personal stance to paper after listening to the second. It was great to see the lengthy notes our students took during each and hopefully we will have their thoughts on the day presented through some blogs in the coming week.

These workshops also gave our students the opportunity to explore the new Tūrangas/library in town. Across the multiple floors divided by Harry Potter staircases, students were discovered playing with lego, searching up biographies on famous kiwis, trying out the virtual reality suite, practising their chess moves and hunting out books from their favourite authors. There really was something for every learner.

Thank you to Mrs Handley, Mr Sutton and Ms Sowman who helped with transport and supervision of our learners.