Book launch: Ann Beaglehole’s How to be an Alien – with Giacomo Lichtner
When: Tues 18 November, 6pm
Where: Unity Books, 57 Willis St, Wellington
See RSVP details on the flyer below
The Book: The book is a humorous memoir, with reflections on refugee policy and being ‘not quite one of us.’ A purpose of the book is to delve into how refugees survive and thrive in a strange new country and to better understand the long-term impact of historic trauma. The book also aims to shed light on shifting perceptions of being Jewish in Aotearoa. It moves between the personal and the political; the ridiculous and the profoundly serious and between past and present.
The book is Beaglehole’s family’s story and her community’s. However, in several sections, she turns to history and to her imagination to fill in gaps in her memory of events and people of long ago.
How to be an Alien begins amidst the chaos of revolution and counter revolution. A family must make an urgent decision to leave, or not to leave, their country. On a winter night in 1956, a mother, father and their daughter step over the barbed wire fences at the border in Hungary and make their way to Austria. No-one knows what the future holds, not for the family who have escaped a tyrannous regime, not for the grief stricken grandmother left behind.
The Author: Ann Beaglehole, historian and former public servant, was born in Hungary. By the age of eight, when she settled in Aotearoa with her family, she had experience of two totalitarian regimes: Hitler’s indirectly, through her traumatized family, and Stalin’s. more directly, as a young child already subject to brain washing at school and in her communist youth group.
Over the years she has evolved into an almost Kiwi historian and writer. Her parents left Hungary so that she (their only child) could live in safety and freedom and receive a good education. In writing this book Beaglehole’s purpose is to say to them: ‘Look what I have become! See how I turned out! Are you pleased?’
Ann Beaglehole is the author of Refuge New Zealand: A Nation’s response to refugees and asylum seekers. Her first book was A Small Price to Pay: Refuges from Hitler in New Zealand, 1936-1946. Ann Beaglehole was short-listed for the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Prize in 2025.
