Friday 1 August, 6:30 - 8:00pm
Event Room 1, Wintec
Free Event, no registration required.
Come and join panellists Alison Mau, Susie Ferguson and Diana Wichtel in conversation with chair Venetia Sherson to hear these newswomen tell their stories.
Parking is available in Ward and Nisbet Streets and in the Wintec parking building accessed through Ward St. Free parking available on campus. Enter via Gate 3 on Tristram St and head to the end near the Wintec wall, but avoid where resident or hostel parking only is stipulated. Look out for our Hamilton Book Month flag banners.
This event is sponsored by Wintec, HarperCollins, Penguin Books New Zealand and supported by Poppies Hamilton with books for sale and signing.
Public Faces, Private Stories: Panel
Author
Her memoir, No Words for This was published in April 2025.
Photo: Luke Harvey
Author
Susie Ferguson was born in Scotland and is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster with RNZ National. After graduating from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and the University of the Arts London, she became a war correspondent, reporting and presenting from around the world – most notably the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Susie immigrated to New Zealand in 2009, and for eight years was co-host of RNZ top-rating show Morning Report. She has also made radio documentaries and podcasts including RNZ’s The Unthinkable and Undercurrent: Misinformation in Aotearoa.
Susie now hosts RNZ’s Saturday Morning, is an ambassador for Endometriosis NZ and lives in Wellington with her family. Bloody Minded was published in October 2024.
Photo: Ebony Lamb
Author
Diana Wichtel is an award-winning journalist and author. Her family memoir, Driving to Treblinka, won the Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-fiction at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
She was born in Vancouver to a Polish Holocaust survivor father and a Kiwi mother too busy to police her obsessive television viewing. She was 13 when her mother brought her and her two siblings back to New Zealand. She never saw her father again.
Wichtel worked at the New Zealand Listener as a television critic, profile writer and feature writer from 1984 until the magazine’s brief closure in April 2020, amassing many awards and a bracing collection of hate mail. She was a columnist for the New Zealand Herald’s Canvas magazine from October 2020 to March 2024. Her Ockham Book Awards longlisted memoir of a life viewed through the maddening, magical lens of television, Unreel, was published in November 2024.
Photo: Sally Tagg
Emily Perkins
Author
Emily Perkins is an award-winning writer from Wellington. Her most recent novel is Lioness (Bloomsbury, 2023). Other books include the Women’s Prize longlisted The Forrests, Novel About My Wife, winner of the Montana Medal for Fiction, and Not Her Real Name.
She also writes for theatre, film and television.
Emily is a member of the Folio Academy, an Arts Foundation Laureate, and a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature.
MC
Venetia Sherson is a former daily newspaper editor and award-winning journalist who now works as a freelance writer and editor. She writes for a variety of publications in print and online, including The Spinoff and RNZ.
She has been a journalist all her working life and editor of the Waikato Times between 1997 and 2003. During her tenure, Venetia was named Editorial Writer of the Year twice.
In 2004, she was awarded the ONZM for Services to Journalism. In the same year, she was appointed Wintec’s inaugural editor-in-residence, where she edited two books Heritage Hamilton (2006) and Baches of Raglan (2008).
Her recent books – Amazing Grace and The Long Road to Summer, are both self-published.
