A new poem by Wellington writer Joanna Cho. Dig deep! I have to write a poem but I’m finding it quite hard so I call Jos and he says ‘Dig deep!’ He is driving back from basketball in Palmy, where he trains three times a week. I say ‘I just wanted to … Read more
A new poem by Auckland poet Hayden Hyams. Matapouri As high as standing allows, where fence posts hang and maps fly where trig towers scratch the lazy back, roots hold up footpaths and footpaths excavate roots I receive this message: Greetings from VFS Global Services LTD Kindly collect your passport from … Read more
A poem by Ockham finalist Helen Rickerby. How to die From here there is nowhere else to go only a question of the journey, the route and the hope of meandering through a few more summers We say we don’t want suffering but often given a chance, we will choose it It all … Read more
An essay by novelist Kirsty Gunn, who claims New Zealand fiction remains besotted with dreary issues of national identity. Quite a while ago now, I wrote a novel about a boy growing up, who loves the sea, loves to surf, and who has a day in the middle of summer when the sea seems to want to … Read more
Claire Mabey praises a breathtaking new novel by Tina Makereti (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Rangatahi). It’s hard to conjure a concept more offensive than the ethnological expositions, or human zoos, of the 19th and 20th centuries. A few years ago in Edinburgh, I saw the controversial installation Exhibit B by artist Brett Bailey. … Read more
Vincent O’Sullivan admires Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn, who continues to write and shape novels like no other New Zealand author. A few years ago Witi Ihimaera gave the New Zealand Book Council Lecture, which he called “Where is New Zealand Literature Heading?” He ticked us off, in his engagingly vague way, for writing fiction … Read more
Christchurch writer Amy Head on the setting for her new novel – Rotoroa, an island near Waiheke, where the Salvation Army ran a rehab centre for alcoholics. When I first learned about Rotoroa, an island east of Waiheke where the Salvation Army ran a rehabilitation facility between 1911 and 2005 (known early on as an … Read more
Elizabeth Alley celebrates the latest novel by the masterly New Zealand writer Vincent O’Sullivan. Is there anyone else like Vincent O’Sullivan? His new novel traces several generations of a New Zealand family, from 1947 to 2004 with the brief, revealing return to 1938 at the book’s end; it opens as the novel’s over-arching character, Stephen, leaves … Read more
Poet Hera Lindsay Bird talks to Megan Dunn, author of a brilliantly funny new memoir about working at a failed bookstore while experiencing a failed marriage and making a failed attempt to write a novel. I first met Megan Dunn the year after I had graduated from a writing programme and had to emerge back into reality … Read more
The second instalment of Peter Wells’ diary of life with cancer, republished from his private Facebook with permission. Read part one here. December 12, 1:56am The humility of my condition. It’s only when I approach the cancer clinic I see all the other wanderers and strays either coming away or walking in the same direction. … Read more
All week this Christmas week we count down the best six books of 2017. Number five: the wild and exciting Milk Island, by Rhydian Thomas, described by reviewer Joseph Barbon as ‘teetering thrillingly on the brink of bad taste’. As well as being the most conspicuous absence from the recently-announced Ockham Prize longlist, Rhydian Thomas’s … Read more
Brannavan Gnanalingam writes about the overwhelming whiteness of English literature as taught in New Zealand – and throws down a challenge to the gatekeepers, including the Spinoff. UK newspaper the Daily Telegraph caused a stir in October with a front page story about a black Cambridge student who had “force[d] Cambridge to drop white authors”. The Telegraph‘s … Read more
A memoir of the end of a marriage by playwright Renée. At the age of 50, Otaki author Renée started to write the plays that made her one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed writers. Her focus was on creating work that put women centre stage. Now, at 88, she has written a memoir; it tells … Read more
A special investigation headed by Steve Braunias asks: Has much happened this year in New Zealand writing? Nothing much has happened this year in New Zealand writing. It’s been pretty quiet. No new sensation, like Hera Lindsay Bird in 2016; a lot of stuff from Victoria University Press, some of it readable; trash from the … Read more
Forget Craig Marriner! We have a new strangest-ever winner of a New Zealand book award. Woah! The award for best dressed female went to Stella Chrysostomou, manager of Page and Blackmore bookstore in Nelson, and the best dressed male prize went to poet Chris Tse, who wore like these feathery swan things on his shoulders, sort of like … Read more
Two new poems by the amazing David Eggleton, a finalist in next week’s Ockham national book award for his noisy book of visions, The Conch Trumpet (Otago University Press). Floral Clock Dawn’s orange soak rinses the copper lid that floats over Noel Lane’s kava bowl back of the War Museum, the front’s white colonnade, and Ferro-Concrete … Read more