Backstage, The Gala Night, photo courtesy of AWF

The Auckland Writers Festival Waituhi o Tāmaki (14 – 19 May) drew record breaking crowds, with more than 85,000 attendees, 25 sellout events, and 167 events featuring 240 participants from across Aotearoa and overseas. The festival included multiple genres, ranging subject matter and captivating voices. Over 25% of the programme was completely free and unticketed. Over 6000 school students were inspired by authors in the days leading up to festival, and Level 5 of the Aotea Centre became Pukapuka Adventures at the weekend, with story, song, dance, art and play events for young book lovers. The pop-up bookstalls, run by The Women’s Bookshop, reported their biggest year for book sales in the Festival’s history. 

The new Festival team included Artistic Director Lyndsey Fineran, who joined the team in August 2023 after a successful tenure at the UK’s Cheltenham Literature Festival. Catriona Ferguson came on board as Managing Director in January 2024. Plus there were three guest curators: Michael and Matariki Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue) whose innovative programming celebrated storytelling in all its forms, and Professor Damon Salesa who brought a strong Pacific-focus to his line-up.

I live streamed the book awards. It was a terrific occasion that honoured sixteen books shortlisted in the four categories, and the three best first books. This year included Te Mūrau o te Tuhi, a special award given for a book written originally and entirely in te reo Māori. Watch online here.

From afar, it felt like the festival was buzzing with ideas, stories, connections. I love how festivals reconnect you with books you have read and loved, and introduce those unfamiliar to you. I invented a pop-up festival at home, reading and loving Rachael King’s novel Gremlings, listening to Sinéad Gleeson’s wonderful Hagstone, catching a few interviews with participants that had aired on Radio NZ National (see links below), ordering some books online. Madeleine Slavick had posted a photo of the poetry table at Unity Books in Wellington and I snapped up a few collections I had not heard of. (Ah! Do send me photos of poetry book tables in your favourite bookshops!) A highlight? I was blown away by Abraham Verghese in conversation with Kathryn Ryan, as he spoke of the joys of medicine and writing, such empathy and wisdom. So resonant for me. Would loved to have gone to his session, crossing fingers it appears in podcast form.

What I was loving in the festival snippets I read on social media was how writing, whatever the genre, was bound by neither rules nor pigeon holes, but was an open ticket to self and world travel, to storytelling with vibrant threads to past, present and future, to building multiple melodies and rhythms, reading tracks and side roads, to challenging dogma and ignorance, to forging sustaining relationships with the books we produce.

I mention this because I am heartened by the way the Auckland Writers Festival celebrates and connects multiple writing communities. We are still drawing hidden voices from the shadows, but I am absorbing such a satisfying richness of books, poetry, storytelling, documentation, essay writing, children’s writing. And I am all the better for it.

Abraham Verghese, photo courtesy of AWF

Some RNZ National links

Best-selling author and Stanford University medical school professor Abraham Verghese in conversation with Kathryn Ryan RNZ National on the joys of medicine and writing

Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with Susie Ferguson RNZ National

Leslie Jamison in conversation with Kathryn Ryan RNZ National

Kiran Dass, Jenna Wee, Michael Bennet and Matariki Bennett discuss Best of the Fest on RNZ National’s Culture 101.

Poetry Shelf invited a number of readers and writers to share a takeaway highlight, a special event, quotations they jotted in their notebook. Thank you all, especially in post festival tiredness, to contribute to this collage. Thank you.

A festival collage

Kiri Piahana-Wong

I enjoyed the session ‘Still Wanted: A Room of One’s Own’ with Anna Funder, Leslie Jamison and Selina Tusitala Marsh interviewed by Paula Morris. Leslie said that being a mother artist has challenged the notion that art has to be produced in pure spheres of time, rather she now has a messier more ragged idea of where art comes from. She believes her art/writing is more complex, layered and interesting as a result. She said: ‘Don’t be afraid to embrace scattered hectic time as full of the richness of the layers of living. Your life is not ‘on pause’ when you are engaged in all those domestic tasks.’

Leslie was asked if she uses affirmations. She said no, but said she might start using Selina’s poetry as her morning affirmations in the future And she expressed a wish that Selina speak to her students.

I found Viet Thanh Nguyen’s session profoundly moving and I cried a few times. He said a reviewer said his work was giving ‘a voice to the voiceless’ or that he should ‘be the voice for the voiceless’. He challenged that, saying that people are not voiceless, rather when this word is used it means ‘the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard’. He said that what is most important is abolishing the conditions of voicelessness.

Carole Beu, The Women’s Bookshop

What a buzz! I was inspired, exhausted and utterly invigorated by the festival. I attended a total of 19 brilliant sessions while my gallant staff ran the festival bookstall (We employed a total of 40 booksellers over the week!)

I was thrilled by Bonnie Garmus, Anna Funder, Celeste Ng, Anne Salmond, Lauren Groff, and finally Ann Patchett in a witty, spontaneous, enthralling conversation with Meg Mason that was a stunning closing event.

I also encountered some truly lovely men. Trent Dalton made 2200 people weep as well as roar with laughter. Richard Flanagan, Abraham Verghese, Paul Lynch, and Viet Thanh Nguyen  were intelligent, sensitive and aware.

The whole event was sensational. The best line – ‘Fiction is the lie that tells the truth’.

photo courtesy of AWF

Nat Baker

“All books are political, and if they say they’re not then they’re political in the worst way”, from Lauren Groff at her awesome session on Friday. I’ve been too sick to attend more than two sessions, but this one was wonderful.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, photo courtesy of AWF

Susanna Andrews

Viet Thanh Nguyen at Thursday’s Gala night: ‘being a refugee has given me the requisite trauma to become a writer’.

Carl Shuker

Leslie Jamison with always excellent chair Noelle McCarthy on how you can fold the chaos of life RIGHT NOW – whether it’s kids or whatever your particular chaos – into your art practice and it can enrich and deepen the work. Nietzschean radical acceptance rather than living in frustration and a sense of distraction.

Noelle McCarthy

‘I know a man who knew a man who knew a locksmith,’ a line by Janet Frame, referring to the doctor who is a dedicatee of many of her books, who opened up her writing life.

Read aloud by Peter Simpson, from the beautiful session on Janet Frame with Meg Mason and Pamela Gordon.

Chair Kiran Dass with Noelle McCarthy and Sinéad Gleeson (Ireland) for the session ‘Ireland: Small Island, Literary Powerhouse’. Photo courtesy of AWF

Kiran Dass

Wow, what an absolutely sensational festival the 2024 Auckland Writers Festival was. A glorious and happy dream of minds and hearts coming together. Everywhere I looked I just saw smiling faces. I loved being in conversation on stage with such talented, thoughtful and smart writers, and loved the many off stage chats with old friends and new. The writing community really is the greatest. I feel so energised, brain-fed, heart-filled, and fired up. Congratulations to Lyndsey Fineran, Catriona Ferguson and their amazing team for delivering a remarkable festival. I’m so grateful to have been included. Putting on a festival is a huge amount of work! So much thinking, care, and mindmelting logistics go into putting on the seemingly effortless magical sessions audiences see take place on the stage.

Lynn Davidson

A special AWF highlight for me (among many highlights) was the fire and energy and humour in the room during the ‘If Not Now, When: Midlife Realisations and Rebellions’, event. Sharing the stage with Emily Perkins and Claire Mabey as we talked midlife shifts and the possibilities they can open up felt like being part of a necessary and welcome conversation. 

Pip Adam

The highlight of my week was Emma Wehipeihana’s acceptance speech for best first book. She spoke directly about working in a stretched health system, I was so glad the Prime Minister was there to hear this. And this quote made me cry: “As a doctor, I’ve seen the inside of most orifices of the human body and held the viscera of the living and the dead and I can tell you without a doubt that it’s the arts and artists who elevate our existence from being sacks of meat circling a dying star to something magical …”

Claire Mabey

I loved what Jane Campion said about writing which was ‘writing is being in a relationship with the subconscious’. And I also really loved the banned books session — some books can be dangerous and troubling but those books help us think — we can’t eliminate ideas that trouble us, we just have to think against them and talk about them

Amber Esau

In The Science Behind Science Fiction session Dr. Octavia Cade asked ‘Are we still going to be the same kind of human without them’ on leaving behind kākāpō, kauri trees, and the environment we already have a relationship with in pursuit of a new planet. This echoed back to me when Sascha Stromach, in the We Can Be On Other Planets: Māori Speculative Fiction session, said, “So much sci-fi is inherently colonial… a Māori approach would be learning to be a kaitiaki of another planet.” There was something sparked for me from these kōrero about the implications of ownership, our responsibilities to who and what gets left behind, and our ethical considerations for exploring new worlds in fiction. 

Catherine Chidgey

I’ve loved being in amongst the buzz of this bumper festival…and I was delighted to have a very dedicated 12-year-old taking part in my workshop on writing child narrators.

Harriet Allan

I hadn’t consciously planned it this way, but I went to a string of events by lively, intelligent, talented women, starting with Rebecca Vaughan performing Virgina Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (it was terrific to be reminded of this work). Other books I had loved and were featured included Anna Funder’s Wifedom and Sarah Ogilvie’s Dictionary People, and neither author disappointed in person. Anne Salmond, Roimata Smail and Katy Hessel all shone, and there were several stimulating line-ups, including three lots of three women, two of which featured authors I have worked with – Patricia Grace and Lauren Keenan – so of course I am biased in loving hearing them. There were a few other (also enjoyable) sessions I attended, and many more I wished I could have seen if money, time and brain-fatigue hadn’t had to be allowed for, but I came away thinking Virginia Woolf might well have felt pleased with the plethora of excellent books now being written by women.

Rachael King

photo courtesy of AWF

The schools days were incredible! So many hungry young minds, eager to meet writers. This photo says it all.

A school session, photo courtesy of AWF

Eileen Merriman

Sadly I didn’t have long at AWF this year but purchased these three beauties on my way to chair a Crime Writers Panel featuring the fantastic Michael Bennett, Paul Cleave and Gavin Strawhan. The book on the bottom helped soothe the nerves beforehand!

Mary McCallum

Jenna Todd, Sinéad Gleeson, Becky Manawatu

Auckland and the Auckland Writers Festival were in the pink yesterday on my first full day at this huge, exciting and at times overwhelming event — Becky Manawatu, Irish writer Sinéad Gleeson and bookseller Jenna Todd matched up with Sinéad’s glorious book to talk about it and Becky’s Auē and upcoming Kataraina (and oh so much about speaking Irish and Māori, living on islands and women finding their best selves, beautifully steered by Jenna). The sky tower pinked in sympathy and so did one of the thousands of people filling the Aotea Centre looking for a literary fix.

Anna Funder was a joy talking with Susie Ferguson about her extraordinary book Wifedom, which tells the life of the “invisible” woman who was the wife of George Orwell and brilliantly dissects the patriarchy as it goes. No pink on her! The book, though, is a pink-adjacent bright orange.

Becky talked about seeing Ana Scotney’s  play ‘Scattergun’ in her Gala Night speech:

“Ana Scotney’s Scattergun was not one woman. She was a room of women, a 
room of people. But I did not know that yet.I was not prepared for how expansive, detailed, how wild, forested, rivered and wholly alive, Scattergun’s world would be. Gorgeous defibrillate your heart, bring-you-back-to-life art. Art. What a wasteland this world would be without it.”

The Gala Night, photo courtesy of AWF

Melinda Szymanik

On my way to my Saturday session with Elizabeth Acevedo, Saraid de Silva and Tsitsi Mapepa – ‘Writing across Generations’ – I spotted Gareth and Louise Ward and stopped to say hi because this is one of the best things about the Festival – connecting with other passionate book folk. Louise proceeded to demonstrate her bookselling skills and I went straight off to buy Acevedo’s new book Family Lore. The session was wonderful, all three writers sharing generously on family and their fab books. Later I met up with fellow writer Jane Bloomfield for a good natter and then I was off to the Illustration Duel between Toby Morris and Giselle Clarkson. This theoretically was for the younger set but the adults in the audience were enjoying it just as much as the children. So much talent, so much networking, so much fun.

Toby Morris, and below with Giselle Clarkson

Gala Night signing table. Photo courtesy of AWF

photo courtesy of AWF

‘Biology Field Trip’

‘Let It be Known’

Jenny Powell has published six poetry collections, two chap books collections and two collaborative collections. She has been a finalist in the UK Plough Poetry Prize, two times finalist in the Aesthetica Creative Arts Award,  finalist in the Lancaster one minute monologue competition,  runner-up in the Plough Poetry Prize,  runner-up in the Mslexia Poetry Competition, short listed in the Welsh Poetry Competition, shortlisted in the New Zealand Society of Authors Janet Frame Memorial Award and in the inaugural NZ Book Month ‘Six Pack’ Competition. In 2020 Powell was the RAK Mason Writing Fellow.

Maybes

This is breath. The orchard shadows laddering an Autumn way out.
I follow the windfall of dead sparrows, to an evening where Time’s vapours
wet their little bones. I tell my dog that I have seen grief come small as birds.
You were one thing. And people come and go. In the orchard I am king
to the passages of persimmon and fig, and the dog finds me worthy.
This is a music video where I look sad in technicolour and women dance
at my hips and the petals come away. If I am lonely, it is loneliness
that I am cool blooded and blued as the hills. At the gallery someone
will say the blue hills represent the fever dream of somebody so distant
he touches love in its purist form. But I am not that person. This is breath.
The dog watches my palms for happiness. I let him down.
We collect sparrows like they might ripen into laughter, two by two.
My dog and I guard them,
little maybes.

Elizabeth Morton

Elizabeth Morton is a yarn teller, poem maker, and neuroscience enthusiast from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her latest collection of poetry is Naming the Beasts (Otago University Press, 2022).

It feels like a year ago we stood on the back deck and peered into the dark, bewildered, bemused, until our camera showed us this. I spiralled into thoughts on staring into the dark fruitlessly, and on how surprisingly, like a miracle, what I am reading, the poem, the novel, the essay, sometimes reveals what I couldn’t see.

It’s been a week of smash and uplift. Let’s focus on the uplift. Listening to Isla Huia read at the Ockham NZ Book Award ceremony (I live streamed it). I loved Isla’s book so what a treat to hear her read. It was indeed a treat to hear all the authors read, and to absorb the ongoing insistence on why books matter. Yes, we are all reading and writing and liking different things, but books matter. They can make a difference in our lives. Emily Perkins nailed it in her acceptance speech.

New books in the post: Meantime, Majella Cullinane (poetry, Otago University Press) Brown Bird, Jane Arthur (children’s novel, Penguin). A Bunch of Family Poems by Adrienne Jansen. Ooh! Exciting package from THWUP of books out in a few months: Slim Volume by James Brown, Tarot by Jake Arthur, Still Is by Vincent O’Sullivan.

The past weeks have been the toughest since my transplant for various reasons and I am so grateful to the nurses, doctors, and my dentist who, no matter how stretched or underpaid they are, are infinitely patient, kind and helpful. Why isn’t this a frontline issue for those in ‘power’? Why do I feel the gap between the privileged and the less so widens? I am sharing this with you because together we are imagining and working towards a country that is equitable, humane, welcomes all cultures, genders, disabilities, languages, is willing to share and support.

Sadly, I can’t accept poem submissions. I do accept books to review.

Week’s links

Monday: Poem: ‘Skeletal‘ by Megan Kitching
aga pukapuka pekapeka open for submissions
Majella Cullinane launches Meantime

Tuesday: book review and reading: Hopurangi -Songcatcher Poems from the Maramataka by Robert Sullivan

Wednesday: 5 Questions – Ian Wedde
Call for Papers – Reading Janet Frame (for) Today
Sweet Mammalian submissions

Thursday: Poetry Shelf celebrates the Book Awards

Friday: Couplets
Celebrate International Biodiversity Day at Tūranga – Foundation Cafe

A poem

Appointment

memorise the light breaking through dark clouds
memorise the wind surfers catching the storm

memorise the tattered jackets on the stooping man
memorise the island its arms outstretched

memorise the bread and pastries at Wild Wheat
memorise the soundtrack on my way home

Paula Green

GLAM UPDATE – CITY OF LITERATURE

Dunedin City of Literature

   /   May 3, 2024

The Dunedin City of Literature team is excited at the recent announcement of a special collaboration with SuperGrans and renowned poet Jenny Powell.

Earlier this year on World Poetry Day, it was announced that Jenny will be running a series of free poetry workshops for SuperGrans, Dunedin staff, volunteers and their community.

Jenny is the Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature South D Poet Lorikeet and is a teacher and award-winning poet. The series of free workshops over six weeks is a way of saying thank you to the SuperGrans group for their great mahi in the community. SuperGrans staff and volunteers provide free holistic support to individuals and whānau to learn new skills to thrive in the modern world.

Jenny will lead the workshops wearing her bespoke ‘chain of office’, which was handcrafted by Dunedin local Jill Bowie of the Dunedin Public Libraries. Jenny, who also delivers free City of Literature poetry workshops to five-year-olds, is thrilled to be working with the SuperGrans. 

For Jenny, giving a poetic voice to seemingly impossible ideas is accompanied by joy and wonder. She wants to encourage and share these qualities through the energy of poems and sees this as a crucial part of her role.

The collaboration was revealed on World Poetry Day, 21 March, as part of an international campaign with all the Cities of Literature around the globe. The workshops will be held over six weeks from June.

NZAEE Webinar Series: Nature and Literacy

Session One: Storytelling and Empathy

Facilitated by Linda Jane Keegan
Guest speakers: Gavin Bishop, Isobel Joy Te Aho-White and Kate Parker

Join us for this free webinar exploring the importance of storytelling and empathy within environmental education and literacy learning. Our panel of speakers are children’s book authors and illustrators and each bring a unique perspective.

We will include some time for questions at the end and you can add your questions to the registration form beforehand if you like. We also have free books to give away to some lucky participants who attend live or who complete our survey after attending or watching the recording.

Note this webinar is the first in a series of two panel discussions, with the second webinar on June 18th.

See here to register

There’s a complex trough of grief.
There’s a ridge of missing hearts.

 

Paula Green

I love couplets, and love the look of a single couplet on the page, how it catches my attention like a solitary cloud in a bright blue sky. I love how it can unfold in a breath, and you get awe or surprise or sweet wit, with or without rhyme, near rhyme, off rhyme, slant rhyme. Enjambment or a picnic stop. Regular beats or irregular stutters. You might meet the commonplace or the complicated, the uncanny or a confession. Truth or lies. You might veer off to unexpected gulleys and crevices. And of course couplets might gather together in clusters; threading ideas, experience, motifs, mood. My early book, Chrome, was an entire book of couplets on the page. I was drawn to how, on first glance you encounter sameness and routine (one critic loathed this banality), but how the more you look, the more nuances and differences are exposed. A bit like looking at the same view of the Waitākere ranges from our lounge window for the past decades.

For a number of years, I have delighted in Bill Manhire’s flair with couplets, the unsaid, the mysterious, the hinted-at anecdote, humour. His deft touch with rhyme. Here is a favourite:

Talking to the Moon

But the moon has drifted out to sea.
It doesn’t know what will make me happy.

 

Bill Manhire
from Victims of Lightning, THWUP, 2010

James Brown emailed me: “Your request has got me pondering couplets – when is a couplet not a couplet etc. I’ve written poems in rhymed couplets as a challenge to myself and because it’s not the done thing (for good reasons – I’m not advocating for rhymed couplets). Poets can be contrary people and because the prevailing form is free verse, rhymed couplets are a challenging temptation. ‘Peculiar Julia’ and ‘Shrinking Violet’ from Floods Another Chamber were turned into songs on a recent album Please Go Wild, that will be released by Polite Company next week. Another poem I wrote using rhyming couplets is ‘Winston Peters’ (The Tip Shop), whom I’ve no time for, so the poem also disrupts the common perception that a poem always conveys the poet’s truth.”

Ah. I have been musing on couplets a lot lately, on why I love them, and why I keep writing them, especially in the middle of the night, occasionally publishing them on Twitter (X). Writing a couplet in my head can be such a satisfying diversion in the midst of pain or doubt or melancholy or 3 a.m. wakefulness. The other night, when I was listening to a BBC programme on seaweed, I decided to post a suite of couplets on Poetry Shelf, both new and unpublished, by local poets, rhyming or not rhyming. And then I slipped into musing on ‘The troubled crocodile cloud / says peace not war out loud.’

A Suite of Couplets

Marriage

His hands in the sink, he felt his loneliness like a tide pulling him out to sea.
She came back up the stairs, more a cloud than a silver lining.

Anna Jackson

The Joke

Each poem an astonishment that breath
has once more entered and then left —

a sneeze, a hiccup, laughter at the joke. 
Inside each joke the fear of death.

Chris Price

from ‘Stone by Stone’

they saw in the north a glimmer a whisper of light
from the fissure a promise of better

elbowing like atua cramped between their olds
trying to prise the lid off to break the mould

Ariana Tikao

Sediments

sediments in the earth
rock and dirt we are the same

looking back looking forward
time collapsed we are the same

Ariana Tikao

Tell You What

One bird explains the sky to another.
That’s the way they operate.

+

In the 1950s all the boys had big ears.
Those were embarrassing years.

+

Every boy with his book.
Every sheep with its showground.

+

We used to call the stove the range.
I don’t see why that should have had to change.

+

Raewyn keeps in touch.
I never liked her much.

Bill Manhire

Unrushed Light

Something sparks at the end of the wire.
I have a memory like a flour sifter.

Paula Green

How to Age

Don’t panic.
Just keep going.

Cilla McQueen

Mixed Messages

Do you like yourself?
I do. 

James Brown

Entwined

*

We are the perfect couple,
like a headache and Panadol.

*

The real myth of Cinderella is that the order is
first the drudgery, then the prince.

*

When he sees the new baby, the child says to his mother
‘Now you’re not just my mum, you’re my brother-er.’

*

In her room, the child talks on a toy phone
playing the game of not being alone.

Emma Neale

Syrinx

He blew hot stupid breath through me and called it music. My mind watched my body 
from up in the sky, could only think how beautiful the reeds look reflected in the river.

Lily Holloway

Inside

Inside the city of longing is the city of bare feet.
Inside the city of fear is the city of cumin seeds.

Paula Green

Dawn

It’s just shy of dawn.
There’s a pheasant on the lawn.

Paula Green

A Suite of Autumn Couplets

[ . . . ]

Chronic pain
like lemon juice rain.

Alpinecore

A toxic man-thought in the brilliant light:
that I could beat a mountain in a fight.

Four Months in Four Regrets

That paisley shirt. Benching my leading scorer.
Excessive drinking. Missing the aurora.

Mujaddara

I know. I know what’s happening elsewhere.
While I mess around with my kitchenware.

Diary, 2024-05-10

Friday. I wrote another first line of a book.
I’m now at one ten-thousandth of 10,000 books.

Braided Rivers

I also look dried-up if you’re passing by.
I also suddenly flood if you ask why.

Warfare

In short, emotional asymmetry.
I think of you and you don’t think of me.

[ . . . ]

As much charm
as a factory farm.

Processing

Consider the empty networks of grief
working like the veins in a dry leaf.

Erik Kennedy

Wed 22nd May 2024, 6:00 pm – 7:45 pm NZST

Tūranga – Foundation Cafe

60 Cathedral Square, Christchurch Central City, Christchurch 8011, New Zealand

Celebrate International Biodiversity Day with an amazing line-up of guest speakers sponsored by RSNZ.

Lindsey Conrow – geographer at UC, talking about black-billed gulls

Gail Ingram – local poet, author of: anthology (n.) a collection of flowers (Pūkeko Publications 2024)

Sara Kross – ecologist / conservation biologist at UC speaking on opportunities and risks for wildlife in our urban jungle

Rebecca (Bex) Le Grice – entomologist and curator at Canterbury Museum, talking about flies

Morgane Merien – entomologist and science communicator at Canterbury Museum, talking about stick insects (and yes, there will opportunities to get a selfie with a stick insect)

Food and drink will be available to purchase.

Photo credit: John Backhouse (1845–1908) on Te Ara

“I am incredibly moved by all the amazing readings we’ve had tonight. They just bring the room alive. Books multiply the world, and it’s just incredible to hear all of the worlds that were evoked in these books we’ve heard from tonight. I really want to shout out to all the books that have been published in the past year. I am so grateful to everyone who supports books, to the booksellers, all the sponsors, to everyone who has come here tonight, to readers, I think of all of us writers as readers, first and foremost, and that’s something that brings us all together.

It’s been helpful for me to remember that it’s been our books going through this prize process, not us, it’s really easy to conflate these things, especially in writing when we’ve put all of ourselves into our work. It is about the books. I hope everyone can go to their local library or booksellers and ask them to recommend a New Zealand book.

Fiction is a form of magic. It’s necessary magic. It has saved many of us at different times in our lives and it will again if we let it. To the politicians and decision makers and anybody who might find themselves in a system of ‘what if?’, I say read a story, read a novel, and the work of the great Canadian writer, Alice Munro, who died today, and remember how vulnerable and layered and loving and connected we all are, and how much we need each other.”

an extract from Emily Perkins acceptance speech
for Lioness (Bloomsbury UK), winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction

Last night I live streamed the book awards. It was a terrific occasion that honoured sixteen books shortlisted in the four categories, and the three best first books. This year Te Mūrau o te Tuhi, a special award given for a book written originally and entirely in te reo Māori, was given to Tā Pou Temara KNZM (Ngāi Tūhoe), esteemed academic and Waitangi Tribunal member, for Te Rautakitahi O Tūhoe ki Ōrākau (Kotahi Rau Pukapuka, Auckland University Press). Watch online here.

Like Emma, I particularly loved the short readings from each author. I loved Jack Tame as emcee. I valued the ongoing insistence that books matter, that our books reflect and speak to us, and that in Aotearoa, we continue to write, read, publish, purchase and borrow books.

I loved Emma Wehipeihana‘s reading from There’s a Cure for This (Penguin). Her acceptance speech for (E. H. McCormick Prize for Best First Book of General Non-Fiction) was brilliant, especially with junior doctors going on strike again today. Emma said: “As a doctor I’ve seen the insides of most orifices of the human body and held the viscera of the living and the dead, and I can tell you without a doubt, it’s the arts and artists who elevate our existence from being sacks of meat circling a dying star to something magical, sometimes with meaning.” The judges write: “Emma Wehipeihana’s engaging, eloquent, witty and sometimes confronting memoir is an extremely impressive first book. It is structured as a series of powerful essays about her journey as a wahine Māori through both her early life and her time in medical school. Emerging as a doctor, she recounts with candour and wry humour the racism she and other Māori experience, and she highlights, in an infinitely readable way, the structural inequalities in the health system.”

I also loved Emily Perkins speech and her reading from Lioness (Bloomsbury UK), winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. Perhaps one of the best acceptance speeches I have heard in years and I’ve quoted most of it above. I began 2024 by reading Lioness. A perfect start to the year – so layered and heart tapping, idea challenging, character rich – it’s a must read. The judges write: “Emily Perkins deftly wrangles a large cast of characters in vivid technicolour, giving each their moment in the sun, while dexterously weaving together multiple plotlines. Her acute observations and razor-sharp wit decimate the tropes of mid-life in moments of pure prose brilliance, leaving the reader gasping for more. Disturbing, deep, smart, and funny as hell, Lioness is unforgettable.”

Gregory O’Brien‘s beautifully published Don Binney Flight Path (Auckland University Press) won the Booksellers Aotearoa NZ Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction. It is an art treasure. So much love and research and care went into this book. The judges write: “Even as an experienced biographer, Gregory O’Brien has achieved a near impossible task in Don Binney: Flight Path. He has encapsulated the artist’s full life, honestly portraying his often contrary personality, and carefully interrogating a formidably large body of work and its place in Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history. O’Brien’s respect for Binney includes acknowledging that he could be both charming and curmudgeonly, and as a result he offers a complete picture of this complex and creative man.”

Book awards have the ability to your attention to books you have missed, books that immediately go to the top of the must-read pile. Today I am ordering a copy of Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa‘s An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays (Bridget Williams Books). He won the General Non-Fiction Award for his and the judges said: “This scholarly but highly accessible collection of essays carves out space for indigenous voices to tell their own narratives. Grounded in a deep understanding of Pacific history and cultures, Salesa addresses the contemporary social, political, economic, regional and international issues faced by Pacific nations. This seminal work asserts the Pacific’s ongoing impact worldwide, despite marginalisation by New Zealand and others, and will maintain its relevance for generations.”

I am also itching to read Emma Hislop’s (Kāi Tahu) Ruin and Other Stories (Te Herenga Waka University Press) which was awarded Hubert Church Prize for Best First Book of Fiction. The judges write: “Emma Hislop’s portrayals are perceptive, providing the women in her stories the space to grapple with disquieting questions that lack easy answers, while the insistent humanity of her characterisations suggests cause for hope. There is not a spare word in these refined and compelling stories, which introduce a striking new voice to our literature.”

Yes, there are countless extraordinary books that made neither the 2023 longlist nor the shortlist, but today, for just this moment, I am saluting our fabulous winners. Long may we write, read, publish, buy and share our local stories, knowledge and imaginings.

Ockham NZ Book Awards page

The Poetry

It is with great pleasure I congratulate Grace Yee, winner of the 2024 Ockham NZ Book Award for Poetry, and Megan Kitching, winner of Best First Book of Poetry. It was a stellar shortlist; I loved all four books on the list, and celebrated them on Poetry Shelf with absolute poetry pleasure (as indeed I did the longlist and various sublime collections that didn’t make either). I have included the judges’ comments at the bottom.

Winner of Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry
Chinese Fish, Grace Yee, Giramondo Press, 2023

Grace Yee’s terrific debut poetry collection caught my attention immediately- the clarity of writing, the intricate and affecting weave of multiples voices, voices that carry family, issues of immigration and racism, overlapping motifs. She weaves English and Cantonese and Taishanese. Dialogue sits alongside the newspaper borrowings, lyricism alongside more scholarly lines. Historical and cultural facts, along with additional comments, arrive in a faint grey font, little disruptions like a persistent shadow that hovers behind every we line we read, every voice we hear. And yes food is a succulent presence, a visibility that heightens both the sense of belonging and not belonging: from roast lamb, brussel sprouts and white bread to steamed rice and wontons in soup.

In my review I wrote:

“Grace has produced a remarkable poetry collection that speaks to who we are and who we have been. It is a vital reminder that we need to do better, that we need to listen and forge connections, celebrate and welcome, make and enact laws that are just, acknowledge the richness of all cultures. Poetry has the power to reflect and speak to humanity. It is essential. To have spent time with this book is a gift.“

What is the point of this anecdote? Is this a story
about assimilation
or – god forbid – miscegenation? This
Cherry character
doesn’t seem very … Chinese.
Could you put her in a chong-sam
or have her wipe a few grains of rice
from her mouth…or explore the Pākeha boy’s point of view
perhaps? How does he feel kissing this exotic
Chinese girl? Does she taste like
soy sauce?

from ‘For the Good Husband’

“Yee’s craft is remarkable,” judge Erik Kennedy says. “She moves between old newspaper cuttings, advertisements, letters, recipes, cultural theory, and dialogue. Creating a new archival poetics for the Chinese trans-Tasman diaspora, the sequence narrates a Hong Kong family’s assimilation into New Zealand life from the 1960s to the 1980s, interrogating ideas of citizenship and national identity. It displaces the reader, evoking the unsettledness of migration. In Chinese Fish, Yee cooks up a rich variety of poetic material into a book that is special and strange; this is poetry at its urgent and thrilling best.”

Grace Yee is the author of Chinese Fish, winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Poetry Award in 2024. Her poetry has been widely published and anthologised across Australia and Aotearoa, and internationally, and has been awarded the Patricia Hackett Prize, the Peter Steele Poetry Award, and a Creative Fellowship at the State Library Victoria. Grace has taught in the Writing and Literature Program at Deakin University, and in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Melbourne, where she completed a PhD on settler Chinese women’s storytelling in Aotearoa New Zealand. She lives in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri land.

Giramond page

Poetry Shelf feature

Winner of The Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry Best First Book
At The Point of Seeing, Megan Kitching, Otago University Press, 2023

When I first started reading Megan’s At the Point of Seeing, it was an intake of breath, knowing this was a poet to watch, this was a book of return, and indeed, on every occasion of reading, I think and feel something new. It is there in the title, this vital cusp, this sway between comprehension and obliviousness. Awareness alongside ignorance. Megan’s collection holds out the natural world, so we may also stand on the point of seeing. So we may absorb the wildness, the wilderness, the edge. So we may inhale beauty and growth. So we may recognise how our states of awareness might be infected or controlled, how our blindness to choices of the past might aggravate contemporary and future life.

In my review I wrote:

“I also read this sumptuous collection as musical sound track, and again it produces wonder, delight, sonic surprise. It is a sweetly mixed playlist as we move from assonance, to rhyme, near rhyme, alliteration, aural dip and lift and slide. It is writing on the wire. It is scoring the world, it is intricate melody, it is open tuning.”

Ah. I am pitching this book to you, when against all odds, poetry is a lifeline, the source of joy, the connecting force, the point of contemplation. We are at the point of seeing, we are at the point of speaking, sharing, hoping, and poetry such as this, poetry as good as this, makes all the difference.

An Environmental History

The book hurts but I go on reading.
It doesn’t take long once we come to it:
sharp as an adze blow, ash blaze, rats’ teeth,
whalebone, deals done, a swift overrun.
The toll of knock-on consequences
like a ship’s wake razing shore upon shore
is a line too often sung. Eaten, exhausted,
our stores of regret for the flightless dead.

Down on the beach, gulls are feeding.
All I do for today is watch each fend
their patch as terns zone in, heads cocked.
Fish shirr water, fleet away to their own resources.
Ponderous, as if evolving only now, dimly
feeling something has changed, chitons
graze the rock. There is food in books too,
better knowing, but until we come to that
let algae, plankton, foliage flourish
long enough to keep the survivors fed.

Megan Kitching
At the Point of Seeing, Otago University Press, 2023

The judge, Erik Kennedy writes: “At the Point of Seeing is one of the most accomplished debuts readers are likely to encounter. The collection uses structure to amplify meaning, and its luxuriant lexicon and sometimes knotty syntax are always invigorating rather than confusing. But this book is never a mere exercise in building poems mechanically. Megan Kitching’s poems are warm-blooded, compassionate, and inquiring. They take the reader into an Aotearoa landscape and a moral universe that they will want to explore over and over again.”

Megan Kitching was born in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland and now lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Queen Mary University, London, looking at the influence of the natural sciences on eighteenth-century poetry. She has taught English and creative writing in the UK and at the University of Otago. Her poetry has appeared in The Frogmore Papers (UK), takahē, Poetry New Zealand, and Landfall. “The horses,” published in takahē 95, was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident. At the Point of Seeing is her debut collection.

Otago University Press page

Poetry Shelf feature

Welcome to a new and ongoing series on Poetry Shelf. I have been thinking a lot about the place of poetry in global catastrophe and the incomprehensible leadership in Aotearoa. How do we write? What to read? Do we need comfort or challenge or both? I am inviting various poets to respond to five questions, and to include a poem or two of their own. This week poet, novelist, essayist and editor, Ian Wedde.

Maxi checking walk weather

1 Has the local and global situation affected what or how or when you write poetry?

Always – sometimes the bad news shuts me up, as now somewhat, with a sense of weariness at the very bad regressive policies of New Zealand’s current government. At other times – ‘You have to start somewhere/ in these morose times’ (The Lifeguard) – or when I wrote poems about call it the human condition (Barbary Coast) it was from a compassion with and for those of us not feeling good about the state of call it the human condition:

and I can’t remember
where the silence ended and speech began,
where vision ender and tears began.
All our promises vanish into thin air.

… bit morose, really.

Other responses have been less introverted, for example the work I did with Fawwaz Tuqan producing the book of poems by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish back in 1973, my contribution of a sort to the situation I lived with while working with Palestinian refugees in Amman, Jordan.

2 Does place matter to you at the moment? An object, an attachment, a loss, an experience? A sense of home?

Yes it does. I love living where I do at present, in Three Lamps, Ponsonby, Auckland, encircled by sea and in a walking-distance neighbourhood with pretty much everything I need within dog-walk reach, including a swimming beach (when not polluted by rain run-off). I lived nearby in Wood Street back in the 60s when I was at university and Ponsonby was very down market, so I have a kind of stretched-out sense of home. There’s a new small book on the way called Ode to Auckland, which begins like this:

1

McCahon’s Defile
For John Reynolds

And so Colin I cast off in my frail craft of words
my craft of frail words of crafty words
into the defile of Three Lamps where
struck by sunshine on the florist’s striped awning
and the autumn leaves outside All Saints 
as you did before fully waking in Waitākere
to look at the elegant pole kauri in dewy light
I defile my sight with closed eyes
and so see better when I open them the Sky Tower
pricking a pale blue heaven like Raphael’s
in Madonna of the Meadows or the scumbled sky of
Buttercup fields forever where there is a constant flow of light
and we are born into a pure land through Ahipara’s blunt gate
a swift swipe of pale blue paint
on Shadbolt’s battered booze bar where bards
bullshitted among the kauri.

Gaunt cranes along the city skyline
avert their gazes towards the Gulf
away from babblers at Bam Bina
breakfast baskers outside Dizengoff
some pretty shaky dudes outside White Cross
beautiful blooms in buckets at Bhana Brothers
(open for eighty years) Karen Walker’s window
looking fresh and skitey across Ponsonby Road
my charming deft dentist at Luminos
most of South Asia jammed into one floor at the Foodcourt

… and so on for a few pages, from 2020.

3 Are there books or poems that have struck a chord in the past year? That you turn to for comfort or uplift, challenge or distraction.

I’ve been loving very regular email posts from my good mate Barry (Bazza) Hill in Queenscliff, Victoria, Australia. He’s been sending regular chunks of a new book for me to have a read and comment as appropriate, so it’s like a drawn-out conversation when I suspect both of us have a glass of wine to hand. His poems are coming in an amazing rush of energy largely driven by rage at the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, a momentum I can’t even imagine matching, especially as the poems I’m writing at present are very slow to come and often minimal when they finish. Sample from back in 2007:

Film Treatment

The klieg lights, the dark,
dripping forest, the rank flanks

of horses, a sneery hound pissing
on wet tents. The collapse

of public transport, the unhygienic
orphanage, the barracks, the unpredictable

success of tour discounts. A lake
in which a lake

is reflected. A mountain
superimposed on another where

thoughts race along the boardwalk
losing touch with their bodies

4 What particularly matters to you in your poetry and in the poetry of others, whether using ear, eye, heart, mind – and/or anything ranging from the abstract and the absent to the physical and the present?

Pretty capacious question! I’d say entertainment in the very broad sense of texts that engage me fully by whatever means, ideally very diverse and as unexpected as possible – poems that entertain everything from the most minimal and conceptual to the most deliberately programmatic. I admit to wearying of let’s call it the introverted domestic-personal, I prefer the unexpected and to not have my sympathy courted too simply.

5 Is there a word or idea, like a talisman, that you hold close at the moment? For me, it is the word connection.

Conversation.

Born 1946 in Blenheim, New Zealand, Ian Wedde has lived in various places in New Zealand and elsewhere and currently in Auckland with his wife the screen-writer Donna Malane and their dog Maxi. They have five sons between them and six grandchildren.