Auckland Writers Festival this week released its programme for its 2026 festival this May, featuring a stellar lineup of international and local authors. 

I am delighted to be taking part in the festival this year, in part to discuss a new project for which I was very grateful to receive a Judith Binney Fellowship for 2026. My project, which I will post more on in future as the research progresses, examines Irish and Māori historical relationships. 

The session is called ‘From Aotearoa New Zealand to the Emerald Isle’. Click on the link for more details. I have also posted the blurb for it below.

Vincent O’Malley is one of our leading historians, with a number of major works exploring Māori–Pākehā relations (most recently: The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākehā Encounters, 1642-1840), the New Zealand Wars and the Waikato War.

For his next project, however, he’s turning his expert eye slightly further afield – some 18,000+ km afield, in fact – to Ireland, to explore Irish immigration to Aotearoa, and the historical interactions between the Irish and Māori.

It’s a project for which O’Malley has been awarded a prestigious Judith Binney Trust Fellowship and will see him draw on archival research in New Zealand, Britain, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

He meets Eugene Bingham (Pākehā, Ngāpuhi) to discuss his body of work, and give fascinating insights into his work so far on Māori and the Irish: A Unique Affinity?

Supported by the Judith Binney Trust

Check out also the other BWB authors appearing at this year’s festival. You can also watch a video from the 2022 Auckland Writers Festival featuring Professor Joanna Kidman and me in conversation with Dale Husband with respect to our Marsden project on how the New Zealand Wars are remembered and forgotten and the BWB Text that emerged from that, Fragments from a Contested Past: Remembrance, Denial and New Zealand History (co-authored with Liana MacDonald, Tom Roa and Keziah Wallis).