Pip Adam’s book launch at Unity Books
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the writers (3!) residencies at the Surrey Hotel in Auckland courtesy of The SpinOff
Calling all New Zealand writers! Apply now for the writers residency at the Surrey Hotel in Auckland.
New Zealand literature’s coolest writing residency is up and running again. The fabulous Surrey Hotel – named the Best Hotel in Auckland by a well-known writer in the New Zealand Herald – has once again agreed to offer a writers residency award in association with The Spinoff.
The winner of the second annual Surrey Hotel Steve Braunias Memorial Writers Residency In Association With The Spinoff Award will be given a week’s free accommodation at the Surrey in Grey Lynn, along with free breakfast and free wifi. They will also pocket a cool $500 from The Spinoff.
There is also be a second and third prize with less nights and less money but the same thrill.
Full details and photos here
Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award entries close end of July
Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award
Auckland poet Kathleen Grattan, a journalist and former editor of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, died in 1990. A member of the Titirangi Poets, her work was published in Landfall and other volumes including Premier Poets, a collection from the World Poetry Society. Her daughter Jocelyn Grattan, who also worked for the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, shared her mother’s love of literature. She has generously left Landfall a bequest with which to establish an award in memory of Kathleen Grattan.
About the award
This biennial award is for an original collection of poems, or one long poem, by a New Zealand or Pacific permanent resident or citizen. Individual poems in the collection can have been previously published, but the collection as a whole should be unpublished. Entries are accepted until 31 July of the award year and must be either received or postmarked by this date. The result will be announced in the November issue of Landfall, and the winner will receive $10,000 and a year’s subscription to Landfall.
Entries to the 2017 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award are now open and close on 31 July 2017.
The winner will be announced in Landfall 234, published November 2017.
The judge of the 2017 award is prize-winning New Zealand poet and fiction writer Bill Manhire. Manhire has won several New Zealand Book Awards, a number of significant fellowships, and he was the 1997/1998 New Zealand Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate. He was also honoured with the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2007.
The award will next be granted in 2019.
Conditions of entry (go here)
- Entries will be a collection of poems or one long poem.
- Minimum submission length is 20 pages. Formatting, font size etc is your choice.
- Entries will be unpublished, original work. Note, it is the collection as a whole that should not have been previously published. Individual poems in the collection can have been published previously.
- Entrants will be New Zealand or Pacific permanent residents or citizens.
- Only one entry per person will be accepted.
- The judging panel will assess the merits of submissions and reserves the right not to award a prize.
- No correspondence with the judges will be entered into.
- Landfall/Otago University Press reserves the right of first publication of the winning entry. Any other entries may be considered for publication.
- The name and photograph of the winning writer may be used by Landfall and/or its publishers for publicity purposes.
- No present employees of Otago University Press or present editors of Landfall are eligible to enter.
How to enter
- Submit two hard copies of your manuscript (your name is NOT to appear on these). Your copies will not be returned.
- Include a cover letter with your personal contact details: name, postal address, email address and telephone number.
- Please ensure the title of the submission is on both the cover letter and on the manuscript itself.
- Please include notes on which poems have been previously published and where in the cover letter, but NOT within the manuscript itself.
Mail entries to
The Kathleen Grattan Award
Otago University Press
PO Box 56
Dunedin 9054
New Zealand
Courier entries to
Otago University Press
Level 1
398 Cumberland St
Dunedin 9054
New Zealand
Further information
Tel 64 3 479 4155
Email landfall@otago.ac.nz
Flow: Whanganui River Poems – Airini Beautrais’s poetry launch
Nau mai, haere mai. Come and help celebrate the launch of Airini Beautrais’s new collection, Flow: Whanganui River Poems.
Featuring stories from the catchment, river and town.
Shipwrecks, floods, soldier-settlers, surveyors, missionaries, protests, poets, petrolheads, deviants, sly-groggers, environmentalists, heroes, anti-heroes and complicated characters.
With readings by Airini, Maria McMillan, and special guests.
All welcome. Drinks and nibbles will be served (in adjacent space as food and drink can’t be consumed in the museum. Please do not bring these items).
Susan Howe introduces Debths, her new poetry collection, at The Paris Review
When I was eight my parents packed me off to Little Sir Echo Camp for Girls on Lake Armington in the foothills of New Hampshire cofounded and owned by Mary Hoisington and Margaret Conoboy ten years earlier. Apparently the women chose the name because of an echo that bounces off the surrounding White Mountains. An actual child may or may not fit parental fantasies. I hated the place. Most of all I dreaded riding classes and spent many nights praying I would be assigned the tired elderly horse with a creaking stomach for the next day’s obligatory ride around the ring. On the one visiting day allowed per summer we rowed across the lake and picnicked on a secluded beach at the edge of a pine forest. I begged them to ransom me. But no. Around four P.M. they left for Boston, leaving me alone with my dread of being lost in the past; absent.
Full extract here
NZ Festival series: Ian Wedde’s Reading Life (and Bill and Catherine’s)
This terrific series edited by Guy Somerset also includes Bill Manhire and Catherine Chidgey.
To celebrate Ian Wedde’s Selected Poems, we are invited to share a smidgeon of Ian’s reading life:
‘The first book to capture my imagination was … A toss up between May Gibbs’ Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (I was scared of the Banksia Men) and Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books (I was Mowgli!).’
Ian’s full book shelf here
Sadly this was Guy’s last edition, but he left a terrific Glastonbury link as an adieu.
Launch of A TransPacific Poetics
A TransPacific Poetics, Litmus Press, 2017
Edited by Lisa Samuels & Sawako Nakayasu
Thursday 27 July 530-7 PM, Gus Fisher Gallery, 74 Shortland Street, Auckland
With Murray Edmond, Ya-Wen Ho, Melanie Rands, & Lisa Samuels
Join us as we launch A TransPacific Poetics, a new collection of poetry, essays, and poetics committed to transcultural experimental witness in both hemispheres of the Pacific and Oceania. The works in ATPP re-map identity and locale in their modes of argument, resituated genres, and textual innovations. A TransPacific Poetics includes Lisa Samuels, Don Mee Choi, Melanie Rands, Jai Arun Ravine, Ya-Wen Ho, Murray Edmond, Susan M. Schultz, Eileen Tabios, Craig Santos Perez, Corey Wakeling, Lehua Taitano, Stuart Cooke, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Barbara Jane Reyes, Myung Mi Kim, and Sawako Nakayasu, with cover art by Dagmar Vaikalafi Dyck, who will also be present for this launch event.
Free & all welcome. Book copies available for a celebratory reduced price of $30 (cash only).
Poets on Tour: Airini Beautrais and Maria McMillan
As Rick Stein would say, we need more of this! Such a very good idea.
From Maria and Airini:
‘(Our portraits are by the wondrous Sarah Laing) Airini and Maria are going on tour in July! Like rock stars only way cooler. Napier 15th, Thames 16th, Auckland tbc, Wellington 28th, Palmerston North 29th and Paraparaumu Beach on the 30th. We’re promoting our new books: Maria‘s and Airini‘s.’
See here for details
Paula’s seven thoughts on Maria’s new book here.
Maria McMillan’s The Ski Flier: Nine thoughts
The Ski Flier Maria McMillan, Victoria University Press, 2017
- The content’s page is in the shape of a mountain, in a book that lets mountains loom large along with little things like snowflakes, bread and goggles. Maria’s repeating mountain motif draws the bigger beyond, that is beautiful and mysterious, closer. Sometimes it is as though I enter a fable.
The mountain and sky push each
other but just enough so the mountain
is held up by the sky, and the sky
does not fall into the sea.
from ‘The Ski Flier’
- Unlikely things coexist and the connections are electric. In the first sequence, ‘Eleven,’ eleven poems comprise eleven lines each, and the real world is like the bony spine upon which curiosity hangs. ‘11.1’ juxtaposes a teapot, a cat and an All Black to illustrate the way we think in metaphors, or conversely, that ‘the teapot is only/ red to me and shines only like itself.’ The gap between the physical object and the thought hosts the eyes of the cats that ‘appear brilliant, appear blind,’ in the light. The poem puts me on a thought loop and I love it.
‘11.3’ leapfrogs from dream static to the body as satellite and this time the loop is heart. The other dreams her uniformed children go to war:
(..) and my sadness is larger
than my ability to take them to some
place hidden by the sheer force of my fury
and I wake knowing myself ordinary
and afraid.
The leapfrog movement, like a musing mind alighting on this and then that, takes you to a satellite base which leads to this strange and genius ending:
(..) Our lives
so many small signals that could no longer
fall onto the ground and receive rain and rot.
- The first lines are little hooks: ‘I, myself, have always wanted to be a
monster’ ‘There will be no mountains in this poem/ only people walking along footpaths in flat cities.’ ‘Whoever knows my name/ knows the sky was dark.’
- The last lines are spinning tops: ‘All your troubles sluiced off you./ You were sycamore leaf and hot standing foal.’ ‘They can see a long way in any direction/ but there is nothing to see.’ ‘I wake each morning as one buried.’
- Dragons stalk the pages with tough days on their backs or querulous children or mountains beneath them. ‘The dragon is as least as likely as our cat.’
- Music changes key; introduces different harmonies and counterpoints.
- Daily life hides and reveals so that you feel something sharp:
By breakfast you’d remembered how we were all cruel
and the starry jacket I bought you was wrong.
Every room is painted the spectacular colour of your yelling.
- Boundaries are porous. Ideas are at work here, and so is heart. This becomes that and that becomes this. It is as though the world is driven movement:
(…) And
there is a movement when they pass,
the snow and the ski flier,
each taking on the character of the other.
- Reading this book lets you into the domestic fracas and then sits you on a mountain to review the sky. It is a puzzle and it pays homage to magnificent things, and is one of the knottiest and most alluring reads I have read in ages. I keep going back to find different pathways through its poetry thicket because each route is rich in rewards.
Victoria University Press author page
NZ Poetry Shelf 