Resilience researcher and grief expert Dr Lucy Hone offers us compassionate, practical guidance for navigating grief and loss. Drawing on personal experience and cutting-edge research, she explores how we endure heartbreak, rebuild meaning and find strength through life’s most difficult moments. You’ll leave feeling more resilient and better equipped to face the future. In conversation with Sarah van der Kley.

An evening with Dr Lucy Hone in Masterton. Hear insights from her new book on resilience and living loss, followed by a book signing. Fundraiser in support of Autism Wairarapa. Thursday 4 June.

When someone you love is living with dementia, or you are living with it yourself, life becomes a series of ongoing adjustments. The losses are real, the exhaustion is real, and the grief rarely gets the recognition it deserves.

Dr Lucy Hone joins Winifred Henderson, Senior Educator at Dementia New Zealand, for a live Q&A conversation exploring what helps people stay emotionally resourced through long, uncertain journeys. Drawing on her research and her own family experience of dementia and loss, Lucy reflects on the realities of caring, the way grief and love and frustration can sit side by side, and what genuinely sustains people over time.

This session is for people living with dementia, care partners and whanau. No presentation, no performance. Just an honest, thoughtful conversation.

Register through Dementia New Zealand.

When psychologist Nigel Latta was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he did what he'd spent three decades teaching others to do. He faced it head on. His final book, Lessons on Living, distilled a career's worth of insight into simple principles that resonated with readers across the country.

Dr Lucy Hone joins Nigel's widow Dr Natalie Flynn and journalist Guyon Espiner, a friend who was given one of Latta's last interviews, for an evening of tribute, reflection and honest conversation about life, loss and the legacy he leaves behind.

Tickets available through the Auckland Writers Festival.

We all have them. The moments where a small decision, a chance encounter, or an unexpected event quietly forked our path and sent us somewhere entirely different.

Hosted by Petra Bagust, this session brings together novelists Lily King and Josie Shapiro, whose bestselling books explore this territory, with Dr Lucy Hone, whose work looks at how we navigate change and loss. Together they discuss the small moments that become the big ones, and the very human pull of imagining the roads not taken.

Note: Florence Knapp is unable to attend due to health reasons. Dr Lucy Hone joins the session in her place.

Most people think grief only follows a death. But what about the end of a relationship, estrangement from family, or the losses that come with illness, infertility or redundancy? Dr Lucy Hone calls these living losses, and they're far more common than we acknowledge.

In this interactive session, Lucy explores why these losses are so often dismissed, and shares practical tools for moving through life's toughest times, and for better supporting the people around you.

Tickets available through the Auckland Writers Festival.

Eight exceptional writers, one question: what reset your compass? Dr Lucy Hone joins a remarkable lineup including Yann Martel, RF Kuang and Tayari Jones to speak to the moments of reckoning, resilience and reinvention that set them on a truer course. A rare chance to see Lucy on stage alongside some of the world's best writers.

Tickets available through the Auckland Writers Festival.