Held on Tuesday 11 October, this event was a great success, with approximately 120 people present, all spellbound by Margaret's talk. The evening began with the usual, wonderful supper put on by the Friends of the Library, then Margaret spoke for almost 60 minutes, then signed copies were available for purchase.
Held on Sunday 9 October at the Raye Freedman Arts Centre, Epsom Girls Grammar, this event was, as usual, a roaring success. Many thanks to Carole Beu.
Margaret Pope's book At The Turning Point was one of eleven book and authors featured.
NEW BOOK RELEASE - 19 September 2011 -
AM Publishing New Zealand
A "MUST-HAVE" for 2011. Click here for full information.
The essential companion to My Life - the autobiography of David Lange, prime minister of New Zealand during the 1980s (published by Penguin in 2005).
Available from all good high street and online bookshops from 19 Sept.
Retail distribution by Publishers Distribution Ltd.
TELEVISION – Thursday 22 September
7.00–7.30pm
Campbell Live– Interview with John Campbell
“I’m glad Margaret has decided to fill some of the silence David left when he wrote less about her than he wanted to. That she has done it with such clarity, wit and wry insight is both a tribute to her subject and a very valuable contribution to our understanding of the recent political past.” Finlay Macdonald
The death of books has been greatly exaggerated
Radical change is certainly producing some alarming symptoms – but much of the doomsayers' evidence is anecdotal, and it's possible to read a much happier story.
Lloyd Shepherd guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 30 August 2011 11.37 BST
London book fair Not dead yet ... the London book fair.
Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Imagest
This time last year, I was metaphorically invited to the only party I've ever wanted to be seen at. My first novel, The English Monster, was picked up by an agent, and then by a publisher, Simon and Schuster. It hits the streets in March 2012.
I've made it, I thought to myself as I clutched my invite to the most exclusive set of all. I'm going to be a published author.
So imagine my surprise - nay, dismay - to discover that publishing's streets were not paved with gold, but stalked by the anxious, the gloomy, the suicidal. "Publishing's dead!" shouted men in sackcloth on Bloomsbury street corners. I had arrived at the party, but the coats were being handed out, the drink had dried up and the hostess had collapsed.
So I asked myself (somewhat desperately, positively naively): are things really that bad? What is the actual state of book publishing in Britain? Can writers really only look forward to a life of penury? Or should I stick my head in the sand, if only to deaden the sound of commissioning editors weeping into their lattes?
...
But hang on a minute. Anecdotally, that's a pretty awe-inspiring collection of proofs. But the plural of anecdote is not data. What is the data telling us?
According to Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry standard for book sales data, book sales are pretty healthy, with one significant proviso which I'll come to. Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later – a decade in which the internet bloomed, online gaming exploded, television channels proliferated, digital piracy rampaged and, latterly, recession gloomed – 229m books sold. So, a 42% increase in the number of books sold over the last 10 years.
Saturday afternoon at 2.30pm and the Maclaurin Chapel at the University of Auckland was packed with authors, poets, publishers, librarians, booksellers, designers, academics and many other friends, family members, and admirers of Chris Cole Catley (left at a recent book launch) who died last Sunday after a brief illness.
This was a celebration of Chris's life following a private family funeral service and I'm sure our dear departed Dame Chris would have thoroughly approved of the event which got off to a fine start with Kirsten MacKenzie playing classic hits from the 30s 40s & 50s on the chapel piano.
In the hour and a half that followed we had music, reminiscences, poetry with eulogies from Judy MacKenzie, Dame Cath Tizard, C K Stead, Sarah Beck, Nicola Scott, Gavin Scott, John & Annie Cole, Elizabeth Aitken Rose, Jenny & Martin Cole.
And then we wandered across to Old Government House for a glass or three of wine and loads of chat and recalling of memories of the life of a special woman who touched so many in her life.
Footnote: Ave, nga mihi, ciao, farewell Chris, yours was a busy life very well spent and like many others I will miss hugely your infectious enthusiasm for life and especially for all things literary. And no one else ever called me "sweetie" ! I shall miss that too. Posted by Bookman Beattie 11.08 am, Sunday 28 August 2011
http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/christine-cole-catley-1922-2011.html
Dame Christine McKelvie Cole Catley, DNZM, QSM
It was with great sadness that we learnt last Sunday that Dame Christine Cole Catley passed away.
I have only known Dame Christine for a couple of years but was very privileged to attend a private dinner with her in March 2009. Christine always supported the NZSA "fund-raising auction", and Brian Morris, director of NZIBS, won the auction in 2008 and invited a group of six to attend. We had a superb evening, "served" by Christine and her son and daughter-in-law, Martin and Jenny, who had just returned from England. It was something extremely special and unique. Christine said she had the best time ever - as did we all.
Christine was a long-standing member and avid supporter of the Auckland Branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors.
There will be a memorial service at Maclaurin Chapel, 18 Princes Street, Auckland, at 2.30 pm, Saturday 27 August.
Our thoughts are with Christine's family at this difficult time.
~ Adrienne Morris
NZPA. New Zealand Herald, 21 August 2011:
Acclaimed journalist, publisher and author Dame Christine Cole Catley has died.
She died in her Auckland home in Devonport on Sunday 21 August, after a brief battle with lung cancer, aged 88.
Dame Christine was awarded the Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in June 2006 for services to literature.
She began a distinguished journalism career, freelancing for the Taranaki Daily News while still at school. At university, she was a part-time reporter for The Press in Christchurch. She was a foundation reporter for the Labour Party's daily paper, The Southern Cross, in Wellington in 1946 and continued writing, often under pseudonyms, for the Listener.
In 1948 Dame Christine had begun broadcasting for Radio New Zealand twice weekly commentaries on most aspects of New Zealand life and then became foreign correspondent for Australia's ABC Network. She established its office in Indonesia in 1956 and for two years she travelled widely throughout Indonesia, covering the so-called State of War and Siege. Travelling in the entourage of President Sukarno, she was summoned to sing duets with him at his mass rallies.
When television came to New Zealand, she was the first TV critic for The Dominion, writing as Sam Cree, and the first TV critic for the Sunday Times when it began, writing as Hillary Court.
In 1973 Dame Christine was appointed to the Broadcasting Council, but was removed by prime minister Robert Muldoon after they crossed swords.
In 1952, with Helen Brew, she founded what became known as the Parents Centre educational movement for pregnant women and their husbands. This spread throughout the country and influenced maternity hospital policy and procedures, making doctors and nurses aware of the important emotional aspects of childbirth and mother-infant bonding.
She entered publishing as a freelance editor for what was then New Zealand's leading firm, A H and A W Reed, and set up her own firm, Cape Catley Ltd, in the Marlborough Sounds in 1973. She published more than 100 books, continuing to write, edit, publish and conduct writers' workshops when she shifted to Devonport on the North Shore in 2000.
She wrote books for publication in the United Kingdom and New Zealand as well as being editor or co-editor of a number of anthologies, and had innumerable feature stories published in newspapers and periodicals around the world.
In 2006 the crowning achievement of her writing career, Bright Star, the biography of remarkable New Zealand astronomer Beatrice Hill Tinsley, was published to wide acclaim.
Dame Christine was the tutor-in-charge of New Zealand's first polytechnic school of journalism in 1967, in Wellington. She insisted that half the students were female - a move that accelerated the number of women employed in the industry.
She set up and chaired the Frank Sargeson Trust to benefit writers through the Buddle Finlay Sargeson Fellowship and was instrumental in forming another charitable trust to commemorate her friend, the historian and biographer Michael King.
Last year she was awarded a CLL (Copyright Licensing Writers' Award) to write her autobiography, which was nearly completed when she died. It is hoped to be published next year.
In a statement issued by her family, they said Dame Christine would be remembered for her enthusiasm for life, her belief in people, her mentoring of new talent, her liberalism and her sense of fun. "To her family, Chris was a true Renaissance woman, loving mother, grandmother and literary godmother to the many journalists and writers she taught and encouraged. Witty, wry, both playful and deeply thoughtful about the needs of her friends and for the country she loved, she was a great raconteur who loved a good story above all else."
Dame Christine leaves behind three children, Sarah Beck, Nicola Scott and Martin Cole, and six grand-children.
