Damien Wilkins
Damien Wilkins is the author of fourteen books. His latest novel Delirious won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. His YA book Aspiring won the Young Adult Fiction Award in 2020. His first novel, The Miserables, won the New Zealand Book Award for fiction in 1994, and he has been long-listed three times for the Dublin Literary Award. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award from the Whiting Foundation, New York, in 1992, and an Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate Award in 2013. He is a creative writing professor at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters Te Pūtahi Tui Auaha o Te Ao. As a musician and songwriter, he writes and records as the Close Readers.
2025 festival sessions
Delirious
Damien Wilkins in conversation with Jane Forrest Waghorn
1.15pm-2.15pm, Sunday 20 July, Whitehaven Room, ASB Theatre Marlborough, $25
Damien’s latest novel Delirious took out the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Award. Delirious is an emotionally powerful novel about families and ageing which addresses the questions we will all face, if we are lucky, or unlucky, enough. How to care for others? How to meet new versions of ourselves who might arrive? How to cope? Delirious is also about the surprising ways that second chances come around. Witi Ihimaera praises the novel’s “grace and humanity”, Elizabeth Knox calls it a “funny, sharp, sad and profound… a masterpiece”. We loved it too and can’t wait to hear Damien in conversation with Jane at the festival.
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Conversation Starters
Damien Wilkins and Richard Shaw in conversation with Jane Forrest Waghorn
7:00pm-8:00pm, Saturday 19 July, Small Town Winery, $25
In his novels, Damien Wilkins often writes characters who are reflecting on what it means to be Pākehā in Aotearoa today. Meanwhile, Richard Shaw draws on real-life stories writing about New Zealanders coming to terms with their settler heritage. Both writers have started conversations among their readers about the legacy of colonisation. Damien and Richard discuss the potential for fiction and nonfiction to make difficult subjects more accessible and to spark curiosity, connection, and meaningful change. They will also reflect on the emotional weight of long-unspoken histories and the ethics of centring Pākehā voices in decolonisation narratives.
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