Welcome to The Spinoff Books Confessional, in which we get to know the reading habits of Aotearoa writers, and guests. This week: Antony Elworthy, illustrator, animator (Isle of Dogs, Kiri & Lou) and children’s book author of The Strange and Unlikely Tale of Montgomery, the Mysterious Bird of Mystery. 

The book I wish I’d written

Where The Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. I wish I could write something so profound, in so few words. And his illustrations are timeless.

Everyone should read

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, because it’s a great achievement. To read it, I mean. It’s like climbing a mountain, and everyone should climb a mountain.

The book I want to be buried with

I guess the point of being buried with a book is to take it with you to the afterlife. So something that would withstand infinite re-readings would be a good idea: a choose-your-own-adventure story for instance. I loved choose-your-own-adventure stories when I was young. Reading them was a thrill, like walking a tight rope – one wrong move would send you plummeting to an unhappy ending.

The first book I remember reading by myself

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, by Dr. Seuss. I’m still a fan – I’ve never really grown out of Dr. Seuss. He wrote a story about a spooky pair of pants that still haunts me.

Utopia or dystopia?

Dystopia, of course. Utopia leaves nothing to desire, and life without desire would be boring.

Fiction or nonfiction?

I prefer fiction. A good storyline will keep me hooked right through a book. Good fiction is profound and meaningful – real life, on the other hand, is chaotic and arbitrary. I don’t like it when real events are twisted into the shape of a story, it always feels false. However, I do love non-fiction books about mushrooms and gold-diggers.

It’s a crime against language to…

When my editor got hold of my manuscript, she swept away several thousand commas. Apparently, I was a chronic over-user of the comma. Now, I am a little sensitive, to too many, commas.

The book I regret reading

I don’t regret reading any book, ever, even those books that I haven’t particularly liked. There have been plenty of books that I have abandoned part way through, and I don’t regret that either.

The book that made me cry

Old Huhu by Kyle Mewburn. Absorbing the loss of a treasured person is so hard, at any age. This sensitive story shows, in a beautiful way, a child coming to terms with the death of his grandfather.

The book that made me laugh

The Mr Gum series by Andy Stanton. I normally prefer a story that follows at least some laws of reason, but these books are a law unto themselves. One of the characters is a gingerbread man called Alan Taylor, who is able to function thanks to his electric muscles. And there’s a gin-swilling old lady called Old Granny – when she was young, she was a gin-swilling child called Old Granny.

The book I never admit I’ve read

I’m not telling.

The book I wish would be adapted to film or TV

I wish my book was adapted for film. That would be nice. Maybe one day.

Greatest New Zealand writer

I love all authors by the name of Maurice. New Zealand has produced a number of great Maurices.

But Maurices aside, I choose Margaret Mahy. She has fired the imagination of generations of Kiwis, she is a true inspiration.

The Strange and Unlikely Tale of Montgomery, the Mysterious Bird of Mystery by Antony Elworthy is available for purchase from Unity Books. Antony is taking part in the Auckland Writers Festival Schools programme in May 2025, details online here. 

Duncan Sarkies’ latest novel, Star Gazers, is about the collapse of democracy in a society of alpaca breeders. Here are some things his intensive research revealed.

1 How greed works, psychologically

Yes, I guess I already understood greed, but I could never understand why people who already have everything they could ever need crave more. Jeff Bezos would probably like to expand Amazon even more, Zuckerberg wants to grow beyond the limitations of governments, Google wants to be the platform we use more than our own brains, Elon Musk wants to destroy everything so that he can save it again, and along the way he wants ownership of all the systems that we now rely on thanks to people like him.

What motivates these people? It’s hard to relate as a human that struggles to pay for basic things, but there is something awful about the human condition that makes us focus on what we don’t have: to strive for what we don’t need, blind to others who need much, much more. 

Why do people who have everything always want more?

2 The noise a male alpaca makes when mating

It’s called orgling and I have had many excitable alpaca breeders demonstrate it to me. Which is more terrifying? The alpaca making the sound or the humans imitating it with such gusto? (That’s an easy answer by the way. Humans are infinitely more terrifying than any other animal).

3 How to have a more comfortable relationship with time

I’m impatient. I didn’t want writing a novel to involve hard work or a length of time beyond, say, a couple of years. Ha! Like the Bowie song, Five years, stuck in my eyes, five years, what a surprise, five years, my brain hurts a lot…

4 Sunk cost fallacies can lead to a certain form of pride (Related to point 3)

5 Berserk Male Syndrome is a thing

It’s a condition that commonly occurs when an alpaca is brought up by a human and starts thinking of itself as human. As it grows it challenges humans the way it would challenge other alpacas in the herd. Where does this lead? Spitting, chest-butting, anti-social behaviours that result in ostracism from the herd. Berserk Male Syndrome is also a thing in humans, but we knew that already.

6 Writing an allegory is challenging when the world moves so fast

I started writing near the end of Trump’s first presidency. Then came Covid. The world threatened to rally around, the environment threatened to recover, it seemed people might learn to be kind to each other, to look out for those more in need. But that didn’t happen, did it?

7 People should take laughter more seriously

If you can make people laugh, that doesn’t mean you don’t have something to say, something to explore. When Stanley Kubrick wrote Dr Strangelove, he chose comedy over other genres, because it had the power to relax its audience and then deliver a sucker-punch. People often ignore comedy’s worth, underestimate what it is doing, the craft of it, the potential of it to be persuasive, to reveal absurdities, to examine dogmas without becoming a boring lecture. Or the other thing happens (see point 8).

8 People want to put things in boxes

They want to describe exactly what something is and they don’t want that thing to misbehave and be more than one thing. I was toying with calling my novel a satire. I got told that a satire had to be funnier than what I had written. Then I got told a satire doesn’t have to be funny. Should I call what I have written a satire? Would that make people more comfortable? We have a generation coming through that are fighting those boxes with regard to gender, and they are right to do it, but in art why is it becoming harder to be genre-fluid?

9 Alpacas are intelligent, and alpacas are stoic

 I laughed when an alpaca breeder told me the stoic thing. But they are; they hide pain. They adapt. They carry on. They ruminate (something more of us should take up) and they look out for each other, except for when they are having their squabbles. Can I say these same qualities apply to humans? Well, yes I can, but not all humans.

10 Democracy is fragile

11 Revenge is a dish best served acrid, and very, very cold

For more on that one, read my novel.

Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies ($38, Te Herenga Waka University Press) launches in Wellington on Tuesday February 18, 6pm at Meow; and is available to purchase from Unity Books.