Annual ‘Kāpiti Festival of Books’ gets Council backing

Kāpiti Coast readers, writers, and booklovers of all kinds will be delighted with a new annual event due to launch in August 2025 – the Kāpiti Festival of Books.

Kāpiti Coast District Council has awarded a grant to local creative writing programme provider Writers Practice to support the setting up of the annual festival.

Council Creativity and Culture Manager Sonja Williams said the festival aimed to become self-supporting over the next two to three years and had the potential to grow into a major annual arts activity, attracting locals and visitors alike.

“We see this as becoming a cornerstone arts event and major visitor attraction and contributor to the Kāpiti Coast’s reputation as an arts destination,” Ms Williams said.

“We’re already home to many avid readers, as the love of our libraries shows.

“We also have numerous talented fiction and non-fiction writers living here, so we think there’s huge potential for this project to showcase and celebrate local and national literary endeavours in the widest sense.

“A Kāpiti Festival of Books is a wonderful way to promote literacy in our district and instil the enjoyment of storytelling through reading, writing, live narration, and listening,” Ms Williams said.

Writers Practice director Kirsten Le Harivel is an event and programme manager, and published author.

“Kirsten has a wealth of experience and knowledge of the literary world, having run the annual Kāpiti Writers’ Retreat for the last 10 years,” Ms Williams said.

Ms Le Harivel said, “The Kāpiti Festival of Books promises to be a fun, inclusive, and accessible collection of book- and story-related experiences across our rohe.

“We envisage activities could range from community storytelling to book launches, performance poetry to literary pub quizzes, writing workshops to events hosting local talent and celebrated writers from Aotearoa and overseas,” Ms Le Harivel said.

If you would like to find out more or get involved with the Kāpiti Festival of Books, contact Kirsten at [email protected].

Ms Williams said the three-year grant, of $12,000 in the first year, was from the Council’s Arts Sustainability Fund, which supports new arts initiatives to become self-sustaining and provide ongoing benefits community wellbeing and the local economy.

Previous recipients include:

• the Ōtaki Pottery Club for the highly successful Matariki Star Glaze festival
• Brigid O’Shaughnessy to set up the well-received Beachside Harmony barbershop chorus
• Phill Simmonds to establish the Raumati South Community Orchestra as an all-inclusive, all-age, all-instrument 50-strong village music group
• Toi Mahara/Te Wananga ki Raukawa for their collaborative project ‘Kia Emiemi’, which led to their exhibition ‘He kete, he whiri, he tangata’ earlier this year.

The fund will open again in April 2025 for projects starting from 1 July 2025. Meanwhile, organisations or individuals with a great idea for a new long-term or ongoing arts initiative are invited to contact [email protected] to discuss their proposal.

Read more about the Arts Sustainability Fund at kapiticoast.govt.nz/ArtsSustainability.