About WORD Christchurch

WORD Christchurch curates and presents a dynamic festival and series of events each year centred around words, stories and ideas.

We spark connections between writers and readers, ideas and action, communities and cultures across Ōtautahi Christchurch and Waitaha Canterbury to create a space where people meet, deepen understanding and collectively explore the power of stories.

We bring together community, creativity, ideas and conversation to present meaningful events. We are facilitators of experiences: feeding minds, shifting perspectives, and bridging the stories that shape us and the worlds we’re yet to imagine.

WORD Christchurch has boldly and successfully delivered high-quality festivals and events for over 25 years, bringing communities together through a love of words in all their forms. We shifted and moved with the pandemic times to a combination of live and live-streamed events. We give Christchurch audiences direct access to the best authors in New Zealand and the world, ground-breaking ideas, Ngāi Tahu stories, and opportunities for local writers to create new work. 

At our core, we’re about books, stories and ideas, which means you’ll see anything from writers talking writing, theatre, music, or poetry in performance, expert panels debating issues, youth and school programmes to inspire a love of reading and writing, and a wide range of only-in-festival events. A typical programme comprises 50+ events spread across five days, with 150 writers across many artforms as our guests. Our primary venues are The Piano, Tūranga, Christchurch Art Gallery and Little Andromeda, plus other venues around the city.

We make the city cool again. For five days we flood the central city with a buzz of excited people and conversations, filling not just our venues, but the whole neighbourhood. As we emerge from a decade of rebuilding, and look towards urban revitalisation and recovery from COVID-19, we’re in amongst it and playing an important role in the return of life to the city’s heart.

At the most basic level, our festival helps create  literate, thoughtful members of the Christchurch community. Fostering a love of words brings with it a knowledge base that assists people with education, job prospects and social cohesion. Beyond this, our events are often encouraging differences in thought to be listened to and considered respectfully, connecting communities through ideas, story and creativity. Being able to use words to communicate how you feel is such a powerful tool for our community’s wellbeing!

You can find out more about our past festivals and programming here.

WORD employs two permanent staff – Steph Walker- Executive Director and  Kiran Dass – Programme Director. For each festival, we employ contract workers to assist in the planning and presentation of the festival itself, and have some phenomenal volunteers who help make our events hum. We also bring in other Programmers from time to time to make sure we’re sharing our resources and voice to as wide a range of communities as possible.