This year’s Auckland Writers and Readers Festival is underway. Festival director  Anne O’Brien says the line up is impressive. “I am very happy with the line-up I have. It’s quiet different from last year where there was a stronger focus on fiction. This year there is a stronger focus on non-fiction,” she says. It is [...]

A traditional gallery space at the Auckland Art Gallery has been transformed into a river-regeneration think-tank focusing on West Auckland’s Whau River. University of Auckland architecture lecturer Kathy Waghorn, 10 architecture students and American architect Teddy Cruz have created the Muddy Urbanism concept. It consists of the students’ projects that examine how the river and surrounding [...]

Organisers of Auckland’s first street art festival, All Fresco, say it was a success and helped to reclaim a bit of the life an increasingly gentrified K’ Road has lost in recent years. Held earlier this month, All Fresco gathered 14 of New Zealand’s best street artists to take over the walls of the K [...]

One afternoon, after playing live in Radio New Zealand’s Auckland studio, Don McGlashan was handed a phone. On the other end, calling from the other end of the country, was Otago-based luthier Ian Davie who’d been listening to the radio in his workshop. He said: “I like your music. I’ve never heard of you before [...]

Dunedin’s students can breathe a sigh of relief, with their student association announcing Saturday’s infamous Hyde St keg party a “success” and that Scarfie culture will live on. But many students from Otago and further abroad were not happy about the restricted entry to the street party this year. When last year’s event got out [...]

They’ve got gaping wounds, dead vacant eyes, brains stuck between their teeth and they’re invading inner-city Auckland courtesy of a creative Kiwi duo. Apocalypse Z, the first interactive zombie theatre experience, and the brainchild of David Van Horn and Simon London, opened last Friday night. “It’s ground-breaking,” says Van Horn. Auckland’s Aotea Square is now [...]

An exhibition of Grahame Sydney’s photography and lithography can be viewed at Jonathon Grant Galleryin Parnell until April 25. Sydney is considered one of New Zealand’s most important artists and was awarded a New Zealand Order of Merit for services to painting in 2003. Gallery owner Jonathon Gooderham says he is such an important artist [...]

Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra and Mel Gibson – all Hollywood stars with a connection to Gifford Jackson, the “godfather” of New Zealand industrial design. An exhibition of Jackson’s work is running at The Depot Artspace in Devonport until April 23. “It’s the first major show of a New Zealand industrial designer’s work. This is pretty [...]

Crowd-funding websites and social media have played a major role in getting a 1980s-themed animated movie off the ground in the UK. Director Chris Blundell and ex-pat Kiwi scriptwriter Jordan Fuller have been making the movie The Hit Squad in London since September. The pair used crowd funding to help finance the film, says Mr [...]