War Zone: Courage Revealed

1945: The tired end of a cataclysmic war is revealed in two books, one fiction and one non-fiction. Greyhound by Sid Marsh weaves a powerful fiction around the story of a Sherman tank named, sardonically, 'Camp Oven Coffin' and its crew as the 2nd NZ Division pursues the retreating German forces towards Trieste. To the Gateways of Florence, a collection of essays by New Zealand and Italian writers including Dr Monty Soutar [Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Awa], was translated from the Italian by Jill Gabriel and published by Oratia Media in August 2011 under Libro International. In the Chianti region of Tuscany, 50 years passed with most of the local civilian population believing it had been the Americans who liberated them from Nazi occupation, when in fact it had been the 2nd New Zealand Division including the 28th Maori Battalion. The stories uncovered through the publication of this book have revived an emotional bond between the people of Chianti and New Zealanders.

Peter Dowling of Oratia Media and Matt Turner, publisher of Greyhound, will join Sid Marsh and Monty Soutar to discuss both stories; one, the wellspring of fiction and the other, the documenting of a history.