The Auckland Writers and Readers Festival line-up has been announced for the five-day event at the Aotea Centre from May 14-18.

More than 70 writers from New Zealand and 19 international guests will be stepping onto the stage during the five day festival including Man Booker Prize winners Anne Enright (The Gathering) and JM Coetzee (Diary of a Bad Year), Italian terrorism and economics expert Loretta Napoleoni (Terror Incorporated, Insurgent Iraq, Rogue Economics). Other international guests include food guru Michael Pollan (In Defence of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma), Dominican- American Junot Diaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), hot-shot Lonely Planet scribe Thomas Kohnstamm (Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?), French writer Philippe Claudel (Grey Souls).

From Australia Luke Davies (author of cult bestseller Candy), Gold Dagger winning crime fiction writer Peter Temple (The Broken Shore) and Derek Hansen (Remember Me).

Canadians Ryan Knighton (Cockeyed) and Heather O'Neill (Lullabies for Little Criminals), Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside.

British writers Sarah Hall (The Carhullan Army, Haweswater and Electric Michelangelo), 'the most important living philosopher' John Gray (Black Mass: Apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia and Straw Dogs), crime writer Mo Hayder (Ritual, Pig Island), eminent biographer Hermione Lee (Edith Wharton), historian and novelist Simon Montefi ore (Sashenka, Young Stalin), and one of Granta's 'Best Young British Novelists' Peter Ho Davies (The Welsh Girl).

Local writers include James McNeish, Duncan Sarkies, Shonagh Koea, Tusiata Avia, Lloyd Spencer Davis, Bernard Beckett, Kapka Kassabova, Sarah Laing, Laurence Fearnley, James Brown, Fiona Farrell, Roger Hall, James Griffin, George Gibbs, Karlo Mila, Carl Nixon, Louise Wareham Leonard, Joe Bennett, Steve Braunias, Fiona Kidman and many, many more.

The five day festival with more than 60 events will be a veritable feast of solo sessions, zesty panel discussions and performance poetry featuring international and New Zealand writers and commentators exploring a raft of ideas in fiction, poetry, songwriting, film, crime, current affairs, publishing, magazines, plays, history, food, biography, art, comedy, science, technology, television, terrorism, Auckland, memoir, travel, shipwrecks, pavlovas, relationships and philosophy.