This year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival featured the theme ‘East versus West’. As various countries and their writers across the globe were covered, New Zealand also got its chance to shine with a couple of New Zealand writers – Kirsty Gunn and Sarah Laing sharing their thoughts on the short stories of New Zealand writer, Katherine Mansfield.
Sarah Laing showcased her book, a graphic memoir entitled ‘Mansfield and Me’.
Mansfield’s stories maybe a little hard for the modern reader to digest but, a member of the famous Bloomsbury set of the early twentieth century she has been called one of the most significant of New Zealand’s writers. Literary giant,Virginia Woolf said of her – “I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of”.
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