Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: ‘#2 (This just doesn’t happen here … but it did)’ by Helen Rickerby

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#2 (This just doesn’t happen here … but it did)

I’m a bit afraid, and resistant, to go back to my essay. Though
that doesn’t mean I’m not constantly checking my emails –
hoping. Turned out the shooter had filmed it all with a
go-pro – like a first-person shooter game. Very often S will
tell me he loves me, and quite often I will ask him ‘Why?’ – or
sometimes ‘Why do you say that just now?’ That was where I
started reading Brighton Rock. The way forward is unknown –
we don’t even know if it’s a good idea. I had been sitting
reading on my phone – actually Paula Green’s interview with
Anne Michaels – I think I’d just read how for her poetry was
reaching out to hold another person – which is kind of
appropriate because I moved over in my seat – she was across
the aisle from me, and I touched her on her arm and looked
concerned and said ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ The one
moment while we were talking and I felt a charge – and shied
away – was when he was talking about blu and azzurro, and
he said azzurro is used for sea and sky and eyes – and I looked
at his blue eyes and I think he looked at mine. Ah good, I’ve
got the fire blazing again. That was the Christmas S bought
me the Roboraptor, and I wondered if he really even knew
me, but I still have Fluffy and am actually very fond of him.
There are too many things and I am behind with all of them –
hence the panic. Thinking about why reading books can be so
calming compared to reading on the internet – and I think it’s
the linearity – a novel doesn’t have to be linear in terms of
chronological, but you know where you are with it. This isn’t
the kind of thing that happens here. We sat on the couch, we
hugged, we held hands, we cried a bit – but not enough. I
expect to be a bit inflamed and disrupted. I sent him a short
email on Tuesday night – after I’d seen him that morning –
telling him two alternative translations for my motto – Dignity
at all times (Dignità sempre and Dignità a ogni momento),
which are both nice. I went to bed worried that I would wake
up to find that there were more attacks around the world. V
said that in Greek the word for progress is connected to the
word for doubt – I’ve been thinking a lot about doubt and the
positive side of doubt – doubt that isn’t crippling, but that stops
you from thinking that you’re right about everything all the
time – the confidence to doubt. Anyway – today there are two
minutes of silence – a call for prayer at 1.30 and then two
minutes of silence at 1.32. The book we lost last time we were
here is still here – the travel guide to Sicily. Love to me, until
now, had not been a thing of wanting but of having.

Helen Rickerby
from My Bourgeois Apocalypse

Helen Rickerby lives in a cliff-top tower in Aro Valley, Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington). She’s the author of four and a half collections of poetry, most recently How to Live (AUP, 2019), which won the poetry category in the 2020 New Zealand Ockham Book Awards. Her recently completed new poetry collection, My Bourgeois Apocalypse, (AUP, forthcoming) is part fragmentary poetic essay, part collage memoir, constructed from (mostly) randomly selected sentences from her journals between 2019 and 2024.

Poetry Shelf launch speech series: Helen Rickerby launches Anna Jackson

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I decided it would be a great idea to share the occasional poetry launch speech. All kinds of things get in the way of attending book launches – distance, time, illness, work, double-bookings! So I thought it would be great to host a series of launch speeches and photos – if you go to a poetry launch and love the launch speech, well maybe the poet and the launcher will give permission to post on Poetry Shelf. Let me know!

First up is Helen Rickerby launching Anna Jackson’s Terrier, Worrier A Poem in Five Parts (Auckland University Press) at Unity Books in Wellington.

Wellington launch speech for Terrier, Worrier

Kia ora kotou. Hi, I’m Helen Rickerby, and it’s an honour to be launching this new book by Anna Jackson – Terrier, Worrier. And lovely to see you all here to help celebrate.

I’ve been a big fan of Anna’s work since I first came across it, back sometime in the dark ages – the late 90s. She was living far away (Auckland) and submitted to a literary magazine I was editing. We got a lot of submissions, but Anna’s really stood out. I accepted it immediately, and that was the beginning of my friendship with Anna’s work.

I got to meet Anna herself not too much later, and then, conveniently, she got a job here in Wellington. She has become one of my dearest friends and her work and her self continue to be a big inspiration to me. She writes poetry that always makes me excited and inspired, which pushes me to be explorative and ambitious in my own poetry.

I know she’s been a great inspiration to many other people too, as a writer and teacher and as a person.

I’ve loved all of Anna’s books, so I don’t say this lightly – and I don’t really want the other books to hear me say this, I mean I don’t want to hurt their feelings and some of them are engraved on my heart – but I think Terrier, Worrier, is my favourite yet.

Auckland University Press, 2025 (page)

I got to see this book in various stages – when I read the first draft I remember thinking – and saying – that it was my favourite kind of thing to read. It’s sparky and fun and deep, it’s gorgeously written, with beautiful turns of phrase. It’s also quite educational – I learned a lot of things reading this. It’s like having a really really good conversation with Anna, and getting to watch her think in action.

This book is a thought diary in poem form – a hybrid prose poem form, which is my favourite.

Anna – or perhaps we should really say ‘the narrator’, because it is of course a composed and beautiful work of art; but while recognising that the voice of this poem is in fact a construct and not exactly or completely Anna herself, it also sounds so much like at least one version of Anna herself, that I am just going to call the narrator ‘Anna’. Anyway, Anna implies in the poem and the notes (I want to put in a plug for the notes – which are almost as rich, fun and conversational as the poem itself, and do feel to me like part of the poem itself): Anna says that she doesn’t think she has thoughts, or emotions. It is so clear to me that Anna is full of emotions, and full of thoughts – as proven by this book. I am someone who feels very full of both thoughts and feelings – when she began this project, I thought and felt that recording one’s thoughts would be quite overwhelming – I feel that I have a thought tumbling into another thought followed by another faster than I can even follow – I couldn’t comprehend how you could capture them all. But I’ve come to understand that one difference between Anna and myself is that she has higher standards of many things, including of what a thought is – and perhaps what a feeling is.

This is longish for a poem, but small for a book – however, in this small book there is just so much! A lot of thoughts and ideas per square inch. As well as her own thoughts, she argues with Ludwig Wittgenstein over language and beetles, questions Hannah Arendt over beauty, reads and considers scientific studies about time and perception – but despite all that dense deepness the experience of reading Terrier, Worrier, is easy, light, spacious, fun.

This is thanks to the beautiful, light, clever and funny way it is written.

And it isn’t just jumping from one profound thought to another – it circles back, revisits, reconsiders and sometimes disagrees with itself, makes connections with other thoughts and, aided by the fragmentary nature of this poem, there is space for us the readers to think and make connections too. For me it is the kind of writing that makes my brain spark.

This quote is from early on in the poem:

I heard birds and thought that although I am only hearing them,and I am not having a thought, it still feels like a thought, almost
like a thought of my own, or a conversation I am having, or
perhaps it is more like reading a poem, where the words, or the
movement of the thought, the song of the thought, is given to
you rather than coming from you, but still moves through you.

She begins by considering whether hearing is a thought, continues on to the nature of poetry and then you realise it’s doing exactly what it’s talking about – we’re following her thinking and the poem is making us feel like we’re doing the thinking, but then there is the space for us to actually think – if we want to – otherwise we can just go back to watching Anna’s brain.

One thing I love about Anna’s work, and actually about Anna herself, is her complete lack of concern with a hierarchy of culture. She mixes the high – classic and classical literature, philosophy etc – with the ordinary – the domestic space, family life, pets – but also treats both the ‘high’ and ‘low’ as much the same – or at least of equal importance. Or equal-ish – I think the pets might actually be more important than the philosophy.

And pets do make frequent appearances in Terrier, Worrier – mostly hens and also cats, as illustrated on the cover. There’s also a whale on the cover, and there are also whales in the book, but I don’t think even Anna could make a pet of a whale, though you never know.

While in some ways this poem is like a monologue, is really a conversation – as well as being in conversation with philosophers and scientists, she has conversations within the poem – or in fact arguments – such as with Simon about whether it would be better to leave doors open (apparently it is). And it also feels like a conversation with us.

I love how she says:

Whether including conversations
counted as cheating was another question. I decided it
probably was cheating, because it is almost impossible not
to have thoughts in conversation.

I have in fact had conversations where I have had trouble having thoughts, but never with Anna.

As I expect you have noticed, we are living in some pretty weird times. While this isn’t a book that engages directly in a political way, it is the kind of book I think we need in these times – the kind of book that stands in opposition to the values that are prominent right now among some of our so-called leaders.

This is a book that is full of curiosity, empathy with other humans and with animals. It is not interested in hierarchies of status, but in the beauty of all the things, big and small, that make an individual and collective life worth living. It values thinking deeply and is not content with the first knee-jerk idea or black and white solutions. It is a book that values connections and conversations, between ideas, between people and animals, and between people and people. These are the kinds of values that give me hope.

I don’t feel I’ve done this book justice – there are so many things that are wonderful about it, but I hope I’ve whet your appetite for it. And so now I declare Terrier, Worrier launched!

Helen Rickerby

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Robert Lord 80th birthday celebration

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Robert Lord would have turned 80 this year – to mark the occasion, the Robert Lord Writers Cottage Trust and Friends of the Cottage are throwing a party on his birthday.

Friday, July 18, 2025
5:30 PM

Dunningham Suite,
Dunedin City Library,
230 Moray Place
Dunedin

A line-up of special guests will read from works by and about Robert, followed by a celebration of his life and legacy with drinks and nibbles.

Tickets are $20 and include refreshments.

Book tickets here

All proceeds go to the Writers Cottage Trust to help keep the residency programme running in the way Robert intended.

If you can’t attend the celebration but would like to support the Writers Cottage Trust, donations of any size are welcomed here.

Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Selina Tusitala Marsh – first ever Commonwealth Poet Laureate

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Poetry Shelf warmly congratulates Selina Tusitala Marsh

Notable New Zealand poet and academic Selina Tusitala Marsh ONZM, FRSNZ has been announced as the first Commonwealth Poet Laureate.

The professor of English at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland is a former New Zealand Poet Laureate and award-winning writer, known for her three collections of poetry and, most recently, her best-selling children’s graphic memoir series Mophead.

The appointment, the first in the 75-year history of the Commonwealth of Nations, will run until 31 May 2027 and involve Marsh crafting original poems for flagship Commonwealth events, including Commonwealth Day, the Commonwealth People’s Forum, and Ministerial and Heads of Government Meetings.

She will also advise on the Commonwealth Foundation’s creative programming – the principal agency for Commonwealth culture – and will appear in person at the Commonwealth People’s Forum and Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua & Barbuda in 2026.

Marsh, who is of Sāmoan, Tuvaluan, English, Scottish and French heritage, says she is “deeply honoured” to accept the role.

“In Samoan, we say, O le tele o sulu e maua ai figota. ‘The more torches we have, the more fish we can catch.’ Poetry is our torch, illuminating paths between our diverse cultures and histories.”

More here

Poetry Shelf pays tribute to Rae Varcoe (1944-2025) with Jo Emeney

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INVENTORY

this is my bed
these are my sheets
here is my clock
on unsteady locker

my pillow fixes my scalp
restraining my
fears from flight
my thoughts turn in

in the locker are my books
my hands, too weak
to hold them now
hold instead, your hand

the morphine comes
between me and thought
between me and pain
between you and me

the nurses do not say
how long, or when
the god who might say why
has long since gone

this is my bed
this is my body
this is my life
these are my letters

 

Rae Varcoe,
from Tributary, THWUP, 2007

In 2019, I wrote about women who are both doctors and poets in Wild Honey: Reading NZ Women’s Poetry. I wrote this: Rae Varcoe’s Tributary examines relations between medicine and poetry, her poems net physiological detail, regimens, procedures, grief, death, near death, diagnosis. Medical information is laid along the line, just as it is relayed to the patient, but there are little leakages of self, less likely on the ward, that suture poet and physician.  I am no stranger to hospital wards, and this collection upturns me, in its fractured medical stereotypes. The overtones and undertones are multihued, and Varcoe carries us in the wake of the personal.

Today, I return to Tributary to acknowledge Rae’s passing, wondering how it will be reflecting upon poems that have connections to the wards at Auckland Hospital that I have frequented since my blood cancer diagnosis (2010) and bone marrow transplant (2022). How do we speak of death and illness? How do we share grief and difficulty and love, a love of friends and family, work, writing, reading? To return to this precious book, with hairs on end, heart beating faster is extraordinary. I feel like I am on the ward with Rae, we are talking poetry and illness, and I am stepping into her poems and feeling what it is to be doctor. I am stepping into the grief she feels at the loss of her mother. And death is rippling down my skin.

Rae’s poetry navigates light and dark, but a lingering gift for me is the incredible lyricism – her deft ear produces music that haunts and delights and advances the subject matter. I don’t think I ever write things on Poetry Shelf – reviews or tributes – without a degree of vulnerability, without letting the personal slip. And this morning, as I contemplate Rae’s passing, I am holding her book close, thinking about the way poetry is so connecting, so illuminating. How Rae’s writing has opened multiple pathways (tributaries) for us into experienced life, into illness and death. It is a grey sky beyond the window frame today, and I am taking this moment to pause, to offer you two of Rae’s poems so you too may pause and linger and reflect. To pay tribute.

With love to Rae’s friends and family, her publisher and fellow writers.

INSCRIPTION

for:
the newly dead, the book unread
the vicious, the vacant, the complacent

the doctor whose stethoscope stopped
the priest unfrocked, the unheard muse

the plane wrecked, the toxin struck
the space shuttle burned to a cinder
and the mother who watched

the spin doctors, the office gossip
the adulterer, the shocked
the bit on the side, the man who cried

the kid with worms, the scholarly
the restless, the resented, the demented
the elderly teacher who couldn’t do sums

the nurturers, the murdurers
the hate-filled heart, the lovers apart
the man whose mower won’t start

the bored, the lauded
the ignored, the sated
and the imploring patient

the hexed message, the answered prayers
the toddler who swears
and the blackness about the shocked electrician

the agnostic, the caustic
the critic, the failure
and the e-mail trail to the genitalia

the pea-green leaves, the munted trees
the vexed, the next door neighbour
and the religious text with blank pages

I make this paper plane

and watch it dip, flip, swoop
then circle back again

 

from Tributary

Tributary, Rae Varcoe
Victoria University Press (THWUP link), 2007

Tribute by Jo Emeney

Rae Varcoe (1944-2025) was a haematologist specialising in leukaemia and lymphoma at Auckland Hospital for 30 years. She was also a very fine poet whose formal practice began at Bill Manhire’s inaugural MA class in 1997.

Rae’s medical training informed her poetry, and her collection, Tributary, features many poems which reflect on her medical experience. Ranging from the satirical to the solemn, the Tributary poems explore the relationship between lay language and medical language, often relying on the holes in meaning which lie between the two to highlight inequality, miscommunication, and the mysteries of life and death. Even the collection’s title works in this way: A tributary vein is one that empties into a larger vein, much as a branch of a river or lake is called its tributary. Historically, a tributary is a person who travels from one land to pay homage to another, often bearing gifts. Perhaps this is what Rae’s doctor-personae enact on her behalf.

One poem from Tributary was selected for Best NZ Poems 2002:

Plot 608, The Old Balclutha Cemetery

how deep grief is

how insubstantial this sand
to hold these
the fleshless remnants
of our parents

all our ancestral DNA

exons to earth
introns to dust

who will read you now
my brave wee mother

and who decode
your silence, Dad

and what will we
the messengers
say to the world

What the combination of medical and lay language — and the conversation between the personal and the scientific — gave Rae’s poetry was complexity and originality. It also moved her poems towards the transcendent and universal. As one of “the messengers”, she brought us knowledge from another land.

Vale, Rae. Your contribution to both poetry and medicine will be lasting.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Song by Jackson McCarthy

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Song

I was licking the moon like
a streetlamp before the water
razed the city — people, jobs,
lovers, I feel your movements
glowing and reckoning with me.
Some people say the loss I felt

with you was inevitable, a foregone
conclusion, but I can still breathe
the air around the dark
shape of your body.

The life I’ve felt has been
larger only than this tide;
tonight, messages from family reach
me, surreal, on my phone.

My cousins in Beirut can feel
the terror in the air, I go on
with so little left to speak; listen
to my heart, these songs
of loss I write while I
cannot hear the bombs.

Jackson McCarthy

Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori and Lebanese descent. His work has been published in Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Landfall, Starling, The Spinoff, and elsewhere, and he currently serves as an editor at Symposia. You can read more of his work here.

Poetry Shelf review: Take Me to Spain by Melanie Jenkins and Jo Wilcox

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Take Me to Spain, by Melanie Jenkins and Jo Wilcox
Beatnik Press, 2025

Food is a vital part of my day: harvesting, planning, cooking, nourishing, sharing. Food is also a significant delight when I travel, a way of drawing closer to a place My last trip to Spain was with my family, a week in Barcelona savouring mouthfuls of food, art and architecture. I stored tastes in my mental kitchen, wanting to recreate versions back home.

Cookbooks are a vital part of my cooking – I have a library of cookbooks, across cuisines, ingredients, proteins, from home-style cooks to celebrity chefs, and everything in between. Flicking through a good cookbook, I will be attracted by a sense of freshness, herbs and spices, tradition and innovation, simplicity and complexity, satisfying taste combos, and that all important marriage of comfort and delight.

Sometimes I reproduce a recipe exactly, but I often use it as springboard. I am often reminded of the link between me as cook and me as poet. You make a poem your own, just as you make a recipe your own!

Take Me to Spain by Melanie Jenkins (photographer) and Jo Wilcox (writer and food stylist) is a culinary delight. When Melanie travelled to Spain for an exhibition of her contemporary fine-art photography, her husband was unable to go, so she went with her friend Claudia. Back home, Jo was so infected by their Spanish stories, she set out to recreate a culinary version of their travel experiences . . . researching and cooking and sharing food! Melanie and Jo worked together to produce a book that does indeed take me back to Spain.

Melanie’s photographs catch the dishes so beautifully, my mouth is watering, but she also evokes the Spanish setting with her on-location photographs. I am soaking up the blue sky, the terracotta roofs, the white-washed buildings. Perfect!

A number of my favourite ingredients make an appearance: paprika, saffron, fresh dill, rocket, spinach, honey, olive oil, fish. Yep this book ticks all my boxes so it is time to get cooking! I carefully follow a number of recipes with terrific results – and I also use some as creative launchpads.

Here is a sampling of some of the dishes I have cooked and shared with my family.

‘Crispy skinned fish with smoky chickpeas & lime & herb oil’.
Super tasty, super harmonious, with spinach, dill and parsley from the garden, it’s a family hit.

Two supremo salads. ‘Grilled vegetable salad with crushed olive dressing’.
The kind of recipe you can adapt to fit what is in your fridge or cupboard or garden. So I used zucchini, eggplant, mushrooms, red peppers – and fresh garden rocket. Loved the dressing. No sherry vinegar so I tried cider vinegar with a splash of honey. Yum!!
Also made ‘Roasted beetroot & orange salad with a berry dressing’.
It’s winter so I used nz mandarins instead of imported oranges, and thawed some organic raspberries for the dressing.

Another night I used the paella recipe as a launchpad, partly because I can’t use a BBQ at the moment, and also because I only had prawns on hand. I made a paella, with the divine presence of saffron and paprika, scattered over some baby tomatoes and halved black olives, then side-stepped and sautéed the prawns quickly in rose-harissa paste and tossed them on top with a good handful of chopped dill. Excuse the steamy photo!

Finally, ‘Boiled orange & olive oil cake’.
Wow! This is absolutely stunning. I put mandarins on the top as they are more flavoursome at the moment. Easy to make, easy to eat, perfect to share with your family in the midst of a tough week!!! The next day, with a short black it is extra yum.

So YES! This gorgeous book me right back to Spain. The recipes are easy to use and easy to adapt! But my Spanish travels are not yet over. This week I aim to cook: ‘Smoked fish cakes with creamy feta dressing’, ‘Potato and zucchini tart’, ‘Mushrooms stuffed with ricotta and pinenuts’.

I highly recommend this cookbook as a way of vacationing in Spain within the comfort of your own kitchen, whatever the season! I think I have a Spanish poem simmering!

MELANIE JENKINS is an acclaimed photographer known for her ability to capture the essence of culture and cuisine through her lens. 
Her passion for storytelling has taken her around the globe, and her fine art photography has been featured in exhibitions and publications internationally. Take Me to Spain is a deeply personal project, inspired by her travels to Spain and her love for vibrant, authentic experiences.

JO WILCOX is a celebrated food writer and stylist with a career spanning decades in the culinary world. From crafting recipes for top publications to cooking for royalty, Jo’s expertise lies in creating dishes that are both approachable and full of flavour. Her passion for fresh ingredients and the art of sharing meals shines through in this collaboration with Melanie, blending photography and recipes into a feast for the senses.

Beatnik page

Poetry Shelf review: You Are Here by Whiti Hereaka and Peata Larkin

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You Are Here, Whiti Hereaka and Peata Larkin
Massey University Press, 2025

The map of your mind can be redrawn; there is no need to keep to the narrows of an old-world view. You can be expansive. You can make new pathways; you can broaden the old ones you already have. You can delight in the kupu shaping your mouth, the physicality of language: tongue and teeth and breath and throat. You hope that one day you will connect it all: sight, sound, meaning.

 

Whiti Hereaka

Massey University Press’s kōrero project invites collaborations “between two different kinds of artistic intelligence to work away at a shared topic”. You Are Here , by author Whiti Hereaka and artist Peata Larkin, is the sixth volume in the terrific series.

In her endnote, Whiti talks abut their shared topic, the Fibonacci sequence – how the book adopts a spiral structure, and how she has been drawn to the spiral as a way of creating stories. She muses upon the influence of DNA and the double helix on Peata’s earlier work, and lingers over patterns in both tāniko and whakairo. She embraces te takarangi the double spiral’s shape, and the unfurling connections between knowledge and wairua.

And here we are as reader, here, at a resonant starting point, in this beautifully designed book, ready to enter a spiralness of reading, with a fecundity of movement, exposures, insight. I think of here as a pivot and then find myself likening it to home, to home as a fulcrum: a physical location, state of mind, an intellectual axis. Think of the way tendrils reach out from here, drawing upon past present future, feeding upon epiphany and challenge.

I am entering the infectious spiral of Whiti’s writing and it is to enter an opening of self, with room for anxiety, doubt, with fragility alongside recognition, navigation and strength. There is so much to draw close to in this unfurling spiral: the way the bone of telling is fleshed out with experience, contemplation, questioning. How we might depart from here, but how here may never leave us. And how an opening of self might be personal but it might also be political. How, for example, the children punished in an education system that privileged one language, one knowledge, one limiting set of customs, are speaking here. How you can be both a stranger and estranged with feet in your own soil, upon your own land.

What draws me deep into the heart, and yes this writing is heart fuelled, is a primacy of connections, recognitions, feelings, expansions, mappings. Begin with the bloodline connections between Whiti and Peata, the two cousins, the writer and the artist.

Breath. A recurring motif. We will breathe in. We will breathe out. We will pause and find multiple ways to absorb and travel through the book. Breath a fundamental ingredient as we read and write.

In her endnote, Peata reveals her media: ink pens, a transparent medium and pure pigments, a lightbox, embroidered silk, acrylic paint. Her artworks, as captivating as the text, offer drawing as a form of navigation, embroidery, cross stitch, kinetic pattern making with multiple textures. It’s like a visual viewfinder with shifting settings that send me freewheeling down the diagonal and retracing the diamond. Glorious. Addictive. I am moving from honeycomb to marshmallow pink, from smudgy cloud to abstract mountain.

Why do I love this collaboration so much? I love its prismatic openness (is that such a thing?), its myriad relations enhancing myriad things, its ability to question, return, reclaim, expand bridges between here and here, to strengthen self-nourishment. In her endnote, Whiti invites us to create our own unfurling spiral (“by forming your thoughts into a group of three words, then five, then eight . . . “), so I did exactly that as the morning light lifted upon a world on the knife-edge of catastrophe. This gorgeous book, unfolding. This fragility, this strength, this succulence, this openness.

Unfurling

the morning fog
onions pumpkin harissa ginger simmering
there’s a new notebook in my miracle lap
a pīwakawaka tūī bush soundtrack
the dawning light

Paula Green
21 June 2025

Whiti Hereaka (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa) is a playwright, novelist, screenwriter and a barrister and solicitor. Her fourth novel, Kurangaituku, won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Peata Larkin (Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, and Ngāti Tuhourangi) graduated with a Master of Fine Art from RMIT, Melbourne, in 2009 and has a BFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland.

Massey University Press page

Poetry Shelf noticeoard: IIML’s Writers on Monday season

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Poetry Shelf reckons this is a must-support series of events – what a terrific set of readings and talks for those of us who love books of all genres.

Writers on Monday is back! The event is run by the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) in conjunction with Te Papa Tongarewa and Circa Theatre and is the perfect opportunity to warm up out of the winter weather by hearing some of our best and emerging writers.

Award-winning books and authors feature heavily in this year’s programme being held each Monday from 7 July to 29 September. Damien Wilkins, winner of the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, will be joined by last year’s winner Emily Perkins to chat about his bestselling novel Delirious, which Newsroom declared “the book of the year’” in 2024. Michelle Rahurahu, fresh from winning the Hubert Church Prize for Fiction at the Ockham Book Awards, will be joined by fellow debut author Gina Butson to take us on a whirlwind tour of their novels Poorhara and The Stars are a Million Glittering Worlds.

Many of the authors in the programme are traveling from across New Zealand and even further afield. With Verb Wellington taking a pause on their readers and writers festival for 2025, Writers on Mondays co-ordinator Chris Price says the Monday events offer Wellingtonians a unique opportunity this year to hear literary stars discuss their work. “High-flying Wellington writers are in the spotlight alongside writers from across the motu and beyond: Nina Mingya Powles on a flying visit from London; Mikaela Nyman, fresh from her standout Auckland Writers Festival appearance, making the journey from Taranaki; and poet Nafanua Purcell Kersel traveling from Hawkes Bay. Several Auckland writers will also be in town for especially for the series.”

Randell Cottage Writer in Residence Saraid de Silva and journalist-turned-fiction-writer Michelle Duff will be in conversation with Tina Makereti to explore their stories about multi-generational women and how we excavate the past to inform the present. de Silva’s Amma has had international success, longlisted for the Women’s Prize, while another featured writer, Jennifer Trevelyan, has had huge international success with her debut novel A Beautiful Family. She caught the attention of a renowned literary agent who secured her a worldwide publishing deal and Allen & Unwin has published her book in NZ. Duncan Sarkies and Brannavan Gnanalingam will be in discussion about their new novels, and why political satire is more important than ever in current times.

Poetry offerings include Nick Ascroft hosting poets from his edition of Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems in a reading, a conversation between Mikaela Nyman and Nafanua Purcell Kersel, and poet laureate Chris Tse talking to poets about how poetry might be reinvented. Anna Jackson, an Associate Professor at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, will speak about her new collection of poetry which has been described as “extraordinary, in both concept and form”.

For a glimpse of the further talent soon to emerge from the IIML’s MA workshops, scriptwriting students will have their words brought to life in lunchtime performances at Circa Theatre, while the next wave of novelists, poets, and creative nonfiction writers will read in special evening events at Meow.

Writers on Mondays will run from 12.15—1.15 pm each Monday from 7 July to 29 September 2025 at Te Papa Tongarewa and Circa Theatre, with two special evening sessions at Meow. Admission is free and all are welcome. The series is supported by the Letteri family. The full programme can be viewed here. Come celebrate Aotearoa writers with us at Writers on Mondays – we look forward to seeing you there.

For further information, contact caoimhe.mckeogh@vuw.ac.nz.