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Crime Stories as Home Truths: Panel
Friday 22 August, 6:00 - 8:00pm
Rototuna Library, 30 North City Rd
Free Event, no registration required.
Claire Baylis talks with Charity Norman and Michael Bennett about exploring social issues in fiction and how their backgrounds working in the legal system have shaped their crime novels.
Free parking is available outside the library. Look out for our Hamilton Book Month flag banners.
This event is sponsored by HarperCollins, and supported by Hamilton City Libraries with refreshments by Poppies Hamilton who will have the authors’ books for sale and signing.
Author
Ex-barrister Charity Norman was born in Uganda, raised and worked in the UK, and moved with her family to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2002. Her eight novels to date include BBC Radio 2 Book Club choices, Richard and Judy and World Book Night titles, finalists in the Ngaio Marsh and Australian Ned Kelly Awards, and they have been translated into various languages.
Remember Me won Best Novel in the 2023 Ngaio Marsh awards; her eighth, Home Truths, was released last year.
Charity was recently named by The Listener as among the ten bestselling New Zealand authors of the past decade. She lives by the Tukituki River in Hawke’s Bay, with her husband and two warring cats.
Author
Michael Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Hinerangi) is an award-winning author and filmmaker. His published works span fiction to non-fiction to YA graphic novel to time travel. Michael’s Hana Westerman series, beginning with Better The Blood (2022) and followed by Return To Blood (2024) and Carved In Blood (2025), has been described as the first crime thriller novel series about a Māori cop, written by a Māori author. The series is included in the curriculum for NCEA level 2 and level 3 students at multiple secondary schools across Aotearoa.
He devoted many years to the fight for justice for Teina Pora. His award-winning documentary The Confessions of Prisoner T led to the discovery of evidence that became key in Teina's eventual exoneration at the Privy Council.
Michael's short films and feature films have won awards internationally, and have screened at numerous international festivals including Cannes, Toronto, Berlin, Locarno, New York, London, and Melbourne.
Chair &Author
Dice (Allen & Unwin, Australia & New Zealand 2023) won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Crime Novel 2024, was a finalist in the Australian Ned Kelly Award for Best International Crime Fiction 2024 and the Aotearoa Booksellers Choice Award 2024 and was chosen by The Spinoff and The Listener as one of the best novels of 2023.
Claire wrote Dice as part of her PhD in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka / VUW. She was awarded a Creative NZ Grant in 2024 and a Michael King Emerging Writer Residency in 2022. Her fiction has appeared in Landfall, Sport, Takahē, Turbine/Kapohau, Horizons and been read on RNZ.
Claire has co-authored academic law articles on how jurors make decisions in real cases, was a researcher on the Trans-Tasman Jury Study and a law academic at VUW for 12 years.
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