Best of the west

While we're still drip-feeding who's new to the Ockham Collective ahead of our March announcement, meet James Littlewood. James is the festival director of Going West, the oldest litfest in the land, and we're delighted to have him on the Collective this year.

James and Going West are currently producing Season 2 of Different Out Loud, a series of five newly commissioned poetry films, with each film based on an in-depth collaboration between a poet and a filmmaker. Season 1 is available – free and ad free – on the Going West website, with works by Hera Lindsay Bird and Luke McPake, Serie Barford and Anna Marbrook, Grace Iwashita Taylor and Ursula Grace, Murray Edmond and Luke McPake, and a special retrospective project: The Loop in Lone Kauri Rd by Allen Curnow, directed by Adam Jones.

"It's no longer enough for festivals to be platforming great work," says James. "We also have to be enabling it. By commissioning and publishing new literary art, Going West is making a direct contribution to the national dialogue."

Also on the website (and on all of the major podcast platforms) you'll find 50 episodes of the podcast series Going West Audio: Voices of Aotearoa. During the lockdowns James's team raided their extensive archive of audio recordings going back 27 years to 1996 (thoughtfully conserved by Auckland Libraries), picked out some of the gems, and converted them into podcastable audio files. They include wonderful items from some of the nation's literary luminaries, including Keri Hulme, Anne Kennedy, Witi Ihimaera and many, many more.