10–12 May
A festival of books, storytelling and ideas
Sold out events
BOOK LAUNCH: THE ANTIPODEAN EXPRESS
A PLACE TO CALL HOME: LATE NIGHT LIT
BOOK BINDING WORKSHOP ON SUNDAY
TEA WITH JANE: A LITERARY PASSION
BOOK BINDING WORKSHOP ON SATURDAY
Welcome from
the Chair of the Featherston Booktown Trust
Peter Biggs, Chair
Featherston Booktown Trust, Registered Charity: CC52369
Kia ora koutou
As Featherston Booktown’s Patron, Joy Cowley wrote: “We are a story-making species… It is how we shape what we do and determines how we react to people with different stories. Story is communication, but it is more than that, it forms us.”
Welcome to the ninth Featherston Booktown Karukatea Festival – a place where stories challenge, inspire and comfort us and where we celebrate books and ideas, especially the artefact and craft of the book. And welcome to the vibrant and generous Featherston Pae Tū Mōkai community – Aotearoa New Zealand’s Booktown.
This year, our highly popular Karukatea Festival features 39 events and hosts 77 presenters and literary provocateurs, and 25 booksellers.
Our Young Readers Programme will take 22 writers/storytellers to over 1,000 students in schools across the Wairarapa.
A special welcome to our booksellers – including Featherston Pae Tū Mōkai’s seven bookshops. They are the heart of the Featherston Booktown Karukatea Festival.
Featherston Booktown belongs to the Featherston Pae Tū Mōkai community, many of whom generously volunteer their time and talents to ensure the Festival’s success – thank you! We are deeply grateful to mana whenua for our ongoing partnership which adds so much to the richness of the Karukatea Festival experience and programme.
I’d like to thank sincerely our sponsors, donors, supporters, Friends and volunteers – Featherston Booktown’s Karukatea Festival, Young Readers Programme and our events series through the year couldn’t happen without your support.
A heartfelt ‘ngā mihi’ to our Operations Manager, Mary Biggs, and her wonderful team. Thanks, too, to the tireless and dedicated Featherston Booktown Board of Trustees – Liz Mellish, Mary McCallum, Craig Linkhorn, Dave Adams, Christine Ammunson and Darrin Goulding. We also recognise and celebrate our Patron, Joy Cowley, and Founding Kaumātua, Lincoln Gould.
Enjoy the 2024 Featherston Booktown Karukatea Festival!
Ngā manaakitanga
Peter Biggs
Chair, Featherston Booktown Trust
About Featherston Booktown
Booktowns are an international phenomenon, celebrating books, from their stories through to their paper, glue and ink.
Featherston is now a fully-fledged, internationally recognised Booktown.
Special thanks to Pete Monk for putting together this video.
petemonk.com
Featherston's Bookstores
For full details about our town's eight all year round bookmongers, visit our Bookstores page.
Chicken and Frog Bookshop
For the Love of Books
The Dickensian Bookshop & Tea Rooms
Loco Cafe & Books
Featherston Crystals and Curiosities
Messines Bookshop: Military History
Featherston Ferret
Mr Feather's Den
Can we ask you a favour?
Featherston Booktown is a charity and in a normal year ticket sales make up a substantial part of our income. Recently, however, Covid restrictions mean our box office revenue has been severely reduced, while many of our costs are fixed.
We have also decided not to charge for events that are shown online as we want to make sure that any of our events are open to the widest possible audience.
Would you consider helping us fill the funding gap by making a donation? We know that not everyone is in a position to do so, but every gift helps us deliver the Karukatea Festival and our other events throughout the year and supports our writers and readers.
We hope you enjoy our online events and that you come away inspired and uplifted. Thank you again for supporting Featherston Booktown.
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Click on the green button below and you'll be redirected to a form on a new browser tab using POLi Pay.
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Type in a donation amount and please provide your name and your email address so that we can email you receipt - as all donations are tax deductible as Featherston Booktown is a registered charity.
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You may be prompted to prove you are a human by selected images from a standard Captcha 'security' feature
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You will be asked to choose your NZ bank and then you'll need to supply your Internet Banking login details, the account you wish to pay from and a 'Payers' code.
...Thank you. We really do appreciate your support.
