WORD Christchurch

07/10/2026

Thanks to Nood, The Piano and Christchurch Art Gallery stages looked so flash throughout our 2026 festival! Nood’s great taste and gorgeous range created spaces onstage for our artists to engage in kōrero and share their insights.

It’s the little details that help make a festival feel special, and Nood helped us do exactly that. A massive thank you Nood, for helping us make our venues look and feel the part!

05/10/2026

Mark it down in your calendar, send it to the group chat! The WORD Christchurch Festival is back in 2027 from 21 - 26 September.

Top tip: Keep an eye out for events throughout the year - WORD is more than just five brilliant days of storytelling, learning and connection.

04/10/2026

Hey, did we hear you love kupu of all kinds? Waiata, stories, histories, poems, performances? You’ll want to block out 21 - 26 September 2027! It’s WORD Week!

Save the date, tell all your mates: springtime in Ōtautahi couldn’t look better if it tried.

30/09/2026

Cabinet of Curiosities is an ode to the elevated mundane and the outright bizarre, and we want to mihi to our partners at Empire9 for supporting this sell-out event.

We traversed Barbadoes street past and present, sapphic mythical metaphors, a clothing rescue project, anti-capitalist orcas, and intersections of art and physics.

Not only have Empire 9 supported this WORD-famous event, but they’ve also helped us boost our socials - have you noticed? Thanks to the team we were kitted up with video gear for the whole week so we can bring you moments of WORD. Thanks heaps, Empire 9!

28/09/2026

Did you miss out on Cabinet of Curiosities tickets this year? Here's your chance to read one of the presentations. Here is John Summers on memories of a pre-quake Barbadoes Street, as published in The Spinoff.

'My mother believed that every part of the city was dangerous after dark, but most of all she said this about Barbadoes Street.'

25/09/2026

The country's longest running poetry series is back - has a brilliant line-up of poets in performance every Thursday in October, starting with Jenny Bornholdt, Rebecca Nash and Grant Shimmin. With so many great poets on the line-up, a $30 season pass is looking like a very good buy!

Ōtautahi Christchurch really is the poetry city.

24/09/2026

Here’s the reason ‘Tally Ho!’ by The Clean became one of WORD 2026’s unofficial anthems. In the hit session ‘I Wish Wrote That’, Grant Robertson took us on a musical journey of living in 1980s Dunedin, also taking us from The Chills and Look Blue Go Purple to Straightjacket Fits and The Verlaines.

Grant admitted that Shihad’s Jon Toogood would’ve made the cut, if only he were a Dunedinite! Truly a session to remember, with Shehan Karunatilaka’s entertaining insight on the Bible (the world’s most successful book club), pip adam illuminating a complicated and unsung Aotearoa author Robin Hyde, and Jon Toogood delivering a thoughtful love letter to Lyttelton musician Aldous Harding.

Ngā mihi nui to our presenters, to Lizzie Tollemache for hosting, and to Craigs Investment Partners for supporting this special event.

23/09/2026

Did you miss out on a sold out event, find yourself out of Ōtautahi, or just want to re-live your favourite session? WORD is over but you can still catch shows you missed! We’ve selected five shows you can watch from home for the golden bargain of just $10 each.

What’s available?

Mana: Tāme Iti | Risky Women featuring Charlotte Grimshaw, Sally Wenley, Elizabeth Knox and Elisabeth Easther | The Crash: Sally Wenley | Foreign Correspondents with Charlotte Glennie | The Good Settler: Richard Shaw

Set up the lounge cinema-style, pour a glass of your favourite beverage and enjoy these filmed sessions. The viewing season closes on 4 October, so get in there!

21/09/2026

Juliette Sauvage is a writer and academic at the University of Canterbury, and is also the editor of the new collection, Emergence. Launched at this year’s festival, Emergence is the first publication of its kind from the Canterbury University Press. It draws together writing from 26 alumni from the Master of Writing programme at UC.

Learn about the process and why this collection is important, then find yourself a copy at UBS!