Writing Grief: Workshop
Saturday 9 August, 9:30am - 12:30pm
Trust Waikato,
4 Little London Lane
$30 cost, registration required.
How can fiction approach grief? In this workshop we’ll explore various ways fiction can dramatise moments of extreme personal loss. How can we give this universal experience a feeling of newness? How can we shape our fictional scenes to give grief emotional force on the page? Damien will talk about some of his favourite moments of literary grief and we’ll also complete a writing exercise.
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The workshop costs $30 and includes morning tea. Registration required.
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The Trust Waikato Building is on Little London Lane, off London Street, Hamilton. The Trust has a sizable carpark and there's ample parking outside and close by.
Author
Damien Wilkins is the author of fourteen books. 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. Aspiring was the winner of the Young Adult Fiction Award in 2020. He is a professor at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters Te PÅ«tahi Tui Auaha o Te Ao. As a musician and songwriter, he writes and records as the Close Readers. His latest novel, Delirious, won the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize, New Zealand’s richest literary award.
