Ten of the best literary chats of 2025

From struggling to learn to read at school during the war, Joy Cowley has gone on to become one of New Zealand’s most beloved and prolific authors.

Joy, Full and Fearless, a documentary released in 2025, follows Joy Cowley's life from a painful childhood, a loveless first marriage to a love of motorbikes, planes, family and inspiring children through the written word.

Now a deep sense of spirituality continues to guide Cowley, who now lives in Dunedin. She's still writing in her 90th year.

“When I was young, I used to say that I was a human being on a spiritual journey. It's the other way around, I think we're all spiritual beings on human journeys,” she says.

"I've met some killers in my time, and some of them just view other people as an inconvenience, a trouble to be removed," says former Australian police detective Duncan McNab.

Erin Patterson never imagined that any of her victims would survive the deadly Beef Wellington lunch, he says.

"I always thought that she had planned this case in some detail, but she hasn't planned on being caught."

McNab, attended the trial, and examines the case in his new book, Recipe for Murder.

"I don't think she assumed that Ian Wilkinson would survive," McNab told RNZ's Saturday Morning.

Set in a post-climate change future where survivors are haunted by the richness of a lost world, the acclaimed British author Ian McEwan's latest novel is a quest, literary thriller and love story.

What We Can Know is set in 2119, in a world submerged by rising seas, and is described as science fiction, without the science.

British novelist and screenwriter McEwan told RNZ’s Saturday Morning that he admires the genre – up to a point.

“What is the future of our view of history, of our relationship to language, our view of the past that might have led the future into such dire straits? And what is the future of love itself?

“I don't see this reflected constantly in science fiction; it tends to be technology-related at its worst end, the end that doesn't interest me at all - intergalactic warfare or anti-gravity boots."

The future world McEwan imagines has endured cataclysmic events, and yet somehow humanity has “scraped through”, he says.

The 80-year-old writer shares his "extremely humbling" experience of learning to speak and write the Māori language in the new RNZ podcast Witi Underwater.

Because of his proud Māori identity and many books about Māori subjects, many people assume is fluent in te reo.

Last year, the award-winning writer faced the reality that not only was this untrue, he'd spent his life living and writing "in the wrong language".

"I would go home to my house in suburban Herne Bay and just realise that in many ways, I had been playing being someone who knew these things and been ashamed of that ... I wonder how the hell I survived so long," he tells Saturday Morning.

Back in the 1970s, the Pacific Northwest was home to some of the most notorious serial killers in US history.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Caroline Fraser grew up near Seattle in the 1970s, in the shadow of Ted Bundy - one of the most notorious serial murderers of women in American history.

He wasn't the only one. The Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, and even Charles Manson were all from the same area.

Fraser’s new book Murderland explores how connections can be made between a notoriously polluted area and the infamous killers it spawned.

Tusiata Avia tackles the complexities of Samoan funeral culture in her latest book about the death of her father.

Giving Birth to My Father, Avia’s latest book of poems is the most challenging book she’s written, she says.

In it she shares her grief over the death of her father, Namu-lau’ulu Mikaio Avia and the difficult situations she faced with her extended family in Samoa.

It felt, she says, like a “very angry book".

Five books in to his Thursday Murder Club series and British author Richard Osman’s four senior sleuths are as popular as ever.

Osman’s hugely popular series of books are set in an English retirement village where four residents investigate unsolved murders.

The first of the series has been adapted into a Netflix movie, Thursday Murder Club, starring Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley.

The Impossible Fortune is the fifth book in the series, and 54-year-old Osman says the company of his four amateur detectives - who've been described as "senior citizen X-Men" - continues to inspire him.

Craig Robertson's new biography charts the multi-faceted life of musician Chris Knox.

In the 1970s and early '80s, Knox formed influential Dunedin bands The Enemy, Toy Love and the Tall Dwarfs.

Not Given Lightly, looks at Knox's career from music to satirical cartoons to journalism and commentary.

Knox saw no barriers to his own creativity, Robertson says.

Adam Kay's best-selling debut memoir about being an NHS gynaecologist, This Is Going to Hurt,spawned a hit TV series. He's back with his first novel, A Particularly Nasty Case.

While rheumatologist Eitan, the main character in Kay’s latest novel, may share some character traits with the author, his chosen method of self-medication is not among them, Kay says.

“He's a bit more chaotic than me. An example of that is the fact that this guy, who's a consultant rheumatologist, uses an antihistamine nasal spray at work, except he's replaced the antihistamine with liquid cocaine.

“So, I can categorically say that I didn't do that. But then again, I did drink quite a lot of white wine, not at work, admittedly.”

Trent Dalton is no stranger to writing from the heart, but he’s described his latest novel as his most personal yet.

Emerging from a "dark place" full of violence and drug addiction, Australian best-selling author Dalton says he was driven to anything that kept him out of trouble and became "obsessed with going to higher places".

Best known for his 2018 semi-autobiographical novel Boy Swallows Universe, the former journalist’s latest novel, Gravity Let Me Go, dives into the cost of being obsessed with chasing after stories.

"This is me trying to take an honest look at some of my failings and some of my mistakes that I've made as a husband and as a dad, and I tried to throw them all into this study of long-term marriage that is, as you so beautifully say, wrapped inside a murder mystery," Dalton told RNZ's Saturday Morning.