Rapture: An Anthology of Performance Poetry in Aotearoa,
edited by Carrie Rudzinski and Grace Iwashita-Taylor
Auckland University Press, 2023

Rapture: An Anthology of Performance Poetry in Aotearoa, edited by Carrie Rudzinski and Grace Iwashita-Taylor, includes poems by almost 100 poets. So what is performance poetry? Performance poetry brings poems off the page whether under the tags: performance or slam (think slam competitions) or spoken word. It might be personal, it might political, or a mix of both. It might be out-to-the-edge-of-the-solar-system radical or rebellious. It might be holding-the-hand-of-the-person-next-to-you heartbreaking. It might make you laugh out loud or move your hips in time to the beat.

Listening to performance poetry is a means of transportation, elevation, challenge, reconfiguration, pleasure, world and self expanding … and yes! POETRY JOY!

Performance poetry in Aotearoa ranges from the exuberant dazzle of Show Ponies to the skin tingles of Tusiata Avia’s Wild Dogs Under my Skirt to poetry at festivals such as WOMAD, those in the big cities, those in the small towns, slams, open mic nights, to supportive communities such as Rising Voices Youth Movement, South Auckland Poets Collective, New Zealand Young Writers Festival, Stand Up Poetry and many many more. Performance poetry is alive, vital, wide ranging in Aotearoa.

“These poems riot in harmony,” Carrie and Grace say in their introduction. The editors invited poets to send in poems and then selected those that leapt off the page for them. Carrie and Grace remind us that performance poetry has been the poor cousin of published poetry, but that poets such as Sam Hunt, Tusiata Avia and Selina Tusitala Marsh have taken poems off the page and shared with the world in electrifying and heart catching ways. The anthology is in three sections: Burn it down / Float / Re-earth your roots.

The result is a means of body and heart transportation, elevation, challenge, reconfiguration, pleasure, world and self expanding … POETRY JOY!

Current New Zealand Poet Laureate Chris Tse has written a foreword that resonates with me on a number of levels. It is personal and it chimes with my view of reading, writing, creating and performing poetry. He talks about a Facebook comment that stuck when someone claimed Chris’s poem was more like a story! The comment got him musing on what poetry is. In the end, and it is what guides me as a poet and as a poetry reviewer, the key thing is what does poetry do. For me, it is an open space, an invitation to discover, experiment, play, to take risks, to find comfort. There are ZERO rules. Working with children over the past decades, I know the power of poetry to nourish self, to open windows, build travel routes, self confidence, self bloom. When Chris writes this, my heart moves: “Poetry has been that lifeline for me at various points in my life, and while I write mostly for the page, there’s no denying that getting to perform my work has played an important part in my growth as a poet and as a person.” Yes!

Auckland University Press has produced a sweet book to hold in the hand, great paper stock, striking cover and perfect internal design (by Seven.co.nz), with a hard cover and plenty of photographs and posters.

What better way to celebrate the arrival of this stunning anthology with a reading in the Poetry Shelf Cafe. This morning I have been in my cafe listening again, in the time when I most need poetry, and here I am boosted by the power of poetry performance. Thank you for your mahi, your aroha, your joy. Take a listen! Then take a read!

The editors

Carrie Rudzinski has performed her work over the past 17 years in six countries and has been featured in Bustle, HuffPost and Teen Vogue. She ranked 4th in the world at the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam, won the 2019 Pussy Riot Award at Auckland Fringe Festival, and co-founded Auckland’s JAFA Poetry Slam. Her poems have been published in Landfall, The Spinoff, Stasis Journal, Catalyst and Muzzle, among others. She is the author of seven books and five spoken word albums, and from 2016–2020 she taught the only spoken word course offered at a tertiary level in Oceania at Manukau Institute of Technology. Carrie is the co-creator of three poetry theatre shows – How We Survive (2019), The Bitching Hour (2023) and Hysterical (2022) – the latter of which won Best New Aotearoa Play at the Wellington Theatre Awards and Outstanding Performance Poetry at Auckland Fringe Festival.

Grace Iwashita-Taylor, breathing bloodlines of Samoa, England and Japan, is an artist of upu/words on the page, digital storytelling and live performance, and is dedicated to carving, elevating, and holding spaces for storytellers of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. She is a recipient of the CNZ Emerging Pacific Artist 2014 and the Auckland Mayoral Writers Grant 2016, and highlights of her work include holding the visiting international writer in residence at the University of Hawaiʻi in 2018, and being a co-founder of the first youth poetry slam in Aotearoa, Rising Voices (2011–2016) and the South Auckland Poets Collective. She has published two collections, Afakasi Speaks (2013) and Full Broken Bloom (2017) with ala press, is the writer of My Own Darling commissioned by Auckland Theatre Company (2015, 2017, 2019), and curator of UPU (Auckland Arts Festival 2020 & Kia Mau Festival 2021). Alongside Dr Lana Lopesi, she is co-director of Flying Fetu Festival, dedicated to building abundant futures for Moana artists of upu/word. Grace is currently working on her next body of work, ‘Water Memories’.

Auckland University Press page

The readings

Tamara Tulitua

Tamara reads ‘y/ours not mine’

Tamara Tulitua flows from the villages of Safa’ato’a, Gagāifo, Matāutu, Sapāpali’i, Vailima and Tanugamanono in Sāmoa to her birthplace Aotearoa New Zealand. Tamara writes across fiction, poetry, essay forms. She is a graduate of law and politics from Te Herenga Waka|Victoria University of Wellington and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Te Pūtahi Tuhi Auaha o Te Ao|International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML). She was the IIML Emerging Pasifika Writer in Residence in 2022. Her reviews, fiction, prose/poetry have appeared in anthologies, literary journals and other online publications including Pantograph Punch, Turbine|Kapohau and the Post. Tamara is the founder and facilitator of Vāhui, a collective of Māori/Moana writers.

Hala Nasr

Hala reads ‘To death, we crawl’

Hala Nasr is an Egyptian poet born and raised on the coastal North Shore of Tāmaki Makarau, Aotearoa. Exploring themes of diaspora, solidarity, womanhood, and difference, her poems appear in We Call to the Eye & the Night – Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage and Rapture: An Anthology of Performance Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand. In a past life, Hala performed her poetry solo and with DECOLONISE poetry collective (co-founded with Jahra Wasasala and Logan Dobson) at events including Pasifika, Auckland Fringe festival, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland Town Hall, and Herald Theatre.

Amber Esau

Amber reads ‘Shapeshifter’

Amber Esau is a Sā-Māo-Rish (Ngāpuhi / Manase) writer of things from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She is a poet, storyteller, and professional bots. Always vibing at a languid pace, her work has been published both in print and online.  

Carrie Rudzinski

Carrie reads ‘Always a Godmother / Never a God’ from her album Goddess Bound with original music by Jason Anderson. Photo credit Andi Crown.

(see bio above)

Renee Liang

Renee reads ‘Chinglish’

Renee Liang is a poet, playwright and essayist. She has toured eight plays and collaborates on visual arts works, dance, film, opera, community events and music. Some poetry and short fiction are anthologised. A memoir of motherhood, When We Remember to Breathe, with Michele Powles, appeared in 2019. In 2018 she was appointed a Member of the NZ Order of Merit for services to the arts.

Ben Brown

Ben reads ‘A silent poem’

Ben Brown (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Koroki, Ngāti Paoa) was born 1962 in Motueka, which is further away from him now than he cares to think about. He has been writing all his life for his own enjoyment and published his first children’s book in 1991. He is an award winning author who writes for children and adults across all genres, including poetry, which he also enjoys performing. Generally, if pressed, he will have something to say about anything. In May 2021 he was made the inaugural NZ Reading Ambassador for Children – Te Awhi Rito. He is also a father of two, which he considers his best work to date. He lives in Lyttelton.

Daren Kamali

Daren reads ‘Con-olized’

Daren Kamali – Fijian born New Zealander – lover of words – art – family and Pacific culture. A researcher and multidisciplinary revival artist – poet. Worked in the GLAM sector for over a decade now.. published several poetry collections and recorded musical albums since 1998. writers residencies include – Pacific Writer in Residence at University of Hawai’i -Manoa – 2012 and International Writers Festival 2014 at University of Iowa. Masters in Creative Writing – A Class Honours – University of Auckland 2016. Senior Librarian Pacific – Public Engagement 2017-2023.

Speak the Mountain

for dear Banu

There is a mountain
There is a river
There is a lake

Hold the weeping child to heart
Hold the thirsty and the wounded to heart
Hold the dead and the fearful also to heart
Hold the rubble home and the broken bones

We speak the mountain
We speak the blood river
We speak the grief lake

Marching peace
Marching heart
Marching out

There is a mountain
There is a river
There is a lake

Paula Green

Yesterday I was devastated to read reports that Palestinian poet and writer Mosab Abu Toha was missing after being detained by Israeli forces while he was trying to leave Gaza with his family. Abu Toha is a celebrated poet and scholar who won the American Book Award for his 2022 poetry book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear and he is the founder of Gaza’s first English-language library. He was also writing a regular column for The New Yorker describing daily life in Gaza under siege. In a recent essay, Abu Toha wrote: ‘One idea in particular haunts me, and I cannot push it away. Will I, too, become a statistic on the news?’ This morning when I woke up and checked for any further news about him, there was an update. After an international outcry that spanned news outlets, his publishers, freedom of expression groups and press freedom advocates, Abu Toha was released. Latest reports are that he has been returned to Gaza, reunited with his family and is receiving medical treatment. He is thirty years old.

Kiri Piahana-Wong

What is home?

What is home:

it is the shade of trees on my way to school before they were uprooted.

It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding photo before the walls crumbled.

It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and put in a museum.

It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house to ashes.

It is the café where I watched football matches and played –

My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold all of these?

Mosab Abu Toha

Birdspeak, Arihia Latham, Anahera Press, 2023

You can hear Arihia read form the collection here.

(ii) Hiwa hopes

This morning in memory, my boots crunched my
name into the blades of grass frozen with yesterday’s
anxieties. Today I started asking for things from a
star and wondered if that was a bit entitled, a little
whiny. Hiwa-i-te-Rangi, the most likely star to take on
celebrity status as all of our human hopes flutter to the
edge of the atmosphere like floating coins. Wishing, she
was probably wishing we were better descendants. But
the hopes I had prised from the mitochondria of
my cells and drawn out of the chromosomes I hummed
with. Not interstellar but cellular. The hopes I had
were silent.

from ‘Takapō’

Each poetry review I write this year becomes a way of folding and refolding what a poem is and what a poem can do, in new and surprising shapes, like an origami boat ready to set sail.

Ah … the end of year looms and I am not going to get through all the must-read Aotearoa poetry books in my stack because origami reading and reviewing moves like a lake.

Arihia Latham’s debut poetry collection Birdspeak features the perfect cover with art by Natalie Couch. It is an alluring mix of cloud and bird, texture, mixed media, colour, harmonies, balance, depth. I am gazing deep and it is transcendental viewing as mood and connections surface.

A little like origami looking.

Arihia dedicates her collection to whānau and the dedication is poignant: “you are the sky and my safe landing place”. Her acknowledgement page underlines how her poetry nestles and is nurtured within a community of loved ones, other writers, readers, mentors. It is an important template, so very important at the moment.

The presence of te reo Māori enriches the unfolding sense of self, yes the relationships, along with the musicality of the line, braided narratives, the recalled and the imagined, the magnetism of place.

Think of the land as rhythm, think of our relationships with others as rhythm, and the rhythm of poetry becomes crucial. In Arihia’s deft writing hands, rhythm is storytelling, bird song, beginnings, breathings.

Think of the joy when you fall upon multi-layered poetry that draws you into a single lucid image, place or moment, into the braid, the weave. Arihia builds mood, muscle, meditative effects that lift me off the surface of my day.

Whānau is also a thematic presence as mother, daughter, son, granddaughter. It might be aroha, it might be mourning, it might be love-rage and violence, but whānau produce the pulse of writing. Writing would struggle to exist without them.

Think of balance, how poetry can be both physical and uplift, weight and lightness. How it can be “rubbed red hands” and “mana”. “The muddy bones of mountains” and “human hopes”. “Clean stockings” and “wave language”.

I experienced disillusionment in the day-long whānau
hui on the marae when we talked about taking the old
names back and leaving the one given by the church. And
the dust rises and settles, and I need to know my place
and my privilege. I am not here to step forward and tell
anyone they are colonised. I am here to step back and
listen carefully, to walk slowly, and to pull out the fry
bread when it is just puffy enough and golden brown.

from ‘Dust rises’

Above of all think of breath, because this is breath poetry. It is connecting breath, it is breath between sky and earth, time and place, this person and that person, this love and that loss, this heart and that heart and this heart.

I want to sit under a shady tree with eyes shut, hearing the bush bird song, and listen as Arihia reads the whole collection, listening as it arrives in sweet spiky succulent waves. This is poetry to breathe in and hold.

Arihia Latham (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha) is a writer, rongoā practitioner and cultural advisor. Her work has been widely published and anthologised. She lives with her whānau in Te Whanganui a Tara.

Anahera Press page

like an octopus

the heart muscles its way out
makes it way along the seafloor

towards the trawler
towards the island

the heart has a head
and sends out pain signals

the heart is governed by legislation
that only goes so far

the heart is an octopus
too clever for its own good

the heart has eight limbs
puzzling, pining

when i fight
i fail

my brain is big
but my teeth are small

i die like an octopus
so i may as well live like one

hiding from sharks
mounding up home

A. M. Keeble

A descendant of UK, Austrian and German immigrants, Michaela grew up on Wurundjeri land, and is now lucky to live in Aotearoa. She has just published Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai with her son and co-author Kerehi Grace (Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Ngāti Porou), and with illustrator Tokerau Brown. Her full-length poetry collection surrender was published in 2022. The poem “like an octopus” comes from her art+poetry collaboration “The heart is an octopus” with painter Emma Hercus, on at Railway Street Studios in Auckland from Tues 10th – Sat 28th October.

Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai is reviewed on Poetry Box

Candle

A name gouged in morse code on the door
was all I could manage. My cut-out
tongue, forgetting language.

I understand the empty space
between my gums
is called a vowel.

Buried in me,
the name of my father
like a dormant gene.

The ticket number
of a train through
empty memorylands.

The urge to abandon my body
like a boy in the woods.

To become all-light.

Mouthless as snow,
or the white-hot chest of
a flame, ribcaged with red.

Heart-haunted.

The telegrams flicker
through moth wings.

Xiaole Zhan

Xiaole Zhan is a Chinese-New Zealand writer and composer. Their work explores themes of the body, race, memory, and the intersection between language and music. They are the winner of the 2023 Kill Your Darlings Non-Fiction Prize and the 2023 Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Competition. 

Root Leaf Flower Fruit, Bill Nelson
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023

On some summer evenings my grandparents
would let me sleep on the porch of this garage.
An old camp stretcher, a sleeping bag pulled up to my nose.
I wanted to see the stars. Richer and denser here
than at home. And I remember it
so clearly, the white concrete, green
roller doors, the pine framing underneath the roof,
cobwebs hiding in the corners. I remember it all
so clearly, except the stars. I don’t remember
seeing any stars, and don’t remember why.

from’ Flower’

On reading a poetry collection or verse novel: first pick up the book and savour the title. Secondly, if you want to chart your own routes and sidetracks, read the blurb when you have finished the book. Maybe even reviews. Maybe even this review. That way reading becomes open and surprising travel. If you are reading Bill Nelson’s new verse novel, Root Leaf Flower Fruit, you will need to rotate the book to read the title, and that head spin is the perfect start to an affecting and inspiring read.

Such a tactile sensation as I begin reading – muddy and gritty and foaming – so mysterious with a ‘foreboding’ storm rolling in, with ‘no memory of what happened’. Pace and rhythm, this is what I jot down first. The way Bill deftly pulls you into the rhythm of the line, and how as you move along the currents, whether sweet or sour, it offers all manner of uplift, from the physicality of the poetry, to the cadence of music, to the tang of confession, to the anchor of everyday detail, to the shimmer of the gap.

This is poetry that builds a bridge between the land and family, the seasonal cyclic movement of both inhabited land and its inhabitants. Plough and spade and harvest. Feet in the earth. Compost and windbreaks. Hands planting seeds. A grandson returns to his grandmother’s farm to tidy up the house and land for auction as she is now in a rest home, his partner and children back home. The title triggers the calendar as gardening almanac, and we move into the idea of land as inhalation and exhalation, the acts of care and arranging, trimming and planting, along with the almanac ascension and waning of self.

This is also poetry as eulogy, the grandson is slowly unraveling a prismatic portrait of his grandmother. I want to talk about this extraordinary woman with you but I don’t want to spoil the unfolding portrait, your open road travel. Ah. But this is the woman who cared for her body as she cared for the land, so lovingly, so nourishingly. This is the woman who learned the value of lightness and lift. This is the woman who listens to what is not right. Ah, this is the woman who has taken up residency in my heart. This is the meeting of poetry and story, story and bloom.

This too is poetry as recognition of self. The grandson is recovering – ah I am agonising over what to tell you – but here is the gap, the impulse behind the narrative jumpcuts – he is recovering from a brain injury, fingertips barely grasping the accident. Floating, drifting, dreaming, aching.

Root Leaf Flower Fruit draws us deep into the heart of experience, fracturing and continuous, observational and reflective, imagined and lived, so utterly refreshing the page of being human. It has a wow ending, the layered impact endures, and I wanted to start reading it again, instantly. Importantly for me, this sublime book, exquisitely crafted, fertilised with profound love and connection, is giving me routes back into my own writing. This is a book I simply must read again. Thank you.

You can hear Bill read here in Poetry Shelf Cafe.

Bill Nelson‘s first book of poetry was Memorandum of Understanding (2016). His poems have appeared in Best New Zealand Poems, Sport, Landfall, Hue & Cry, Shenandoah, The Spinoff, Minarets and The 4th Floor, as well as in dance performances and art galleries and on posters. In 2009 he won the Biggs Family Prize in Poetry from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and he is a founding editor of Up Country: A Journal for the NZ Outdoors. He lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara with his partner and two children, and his dog, Callimachus Bruce.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Soup

Red lentils and the kererū gliding and dipping
Lime juice and the family butters bread at the table
Canned tomatoes and outside the vegetables freshly planted
Paprika cumin cinnamon for our memory banks
Fennel seeds to dance on the tongue
Greek yoghurt and it’s song and taste and storytelling
Coconut milk for each heart beating

New asparagus with our footsteps on the black sand lifting
Sautéed leeks and we hear the ocean waves curling
Courgettes added and a small child tumbles
Cannellini beans for the bunched clouds and the deep blue
Chopped garlic and we’re replaying the beach dogs that yelp and spring
Dried tarragon and it’s Te Henga dotterel defending and skittering
Parmigiano for my daughter with the Siena tablecloth gifted
Chicken broth for each heart beating

Onions sweetening and we are making soup together
Chilli flakes for our daughter slicing and stirring
Chickpeas and black beans draining while the bush tūī chorus
Drained tomatoes for my weak hands holding Gaza thoughts
Corn kernels falling in the pot and it’s sweet and sour and blue sky
Perfect avocado sliced but my words cannot fill the gap
Crisp tortilla chips and I see mothers weeping and fathers howling
Fresh coriander washed and dried and there’s the child who cannot understand
Lime juice and it’s testing and tasting
Grating cheese and the pīwakawaka flutters a nose breath away
Chopping garlic and in my midnight dream I’m carrying a soup mountain for Gaza
Paprika and cumin waft and we become story flashbacks
Vegetable broth for each heart beating

Paula Green

Enjoy: Food Worth Sharing with People You Love by Kelly Gibney
(Beatnik Publishing, 2023)

How to review a cookbook? How to review a cookbook at a time when the news of the world is weight, and I am learning to navigate the long road after a bone marrow transplant. My tastebuds are haywire, I eat like a sparrow, certain foods are off limits, my energy half fills a cup but cooking is joy and vital family connection, it is memory and story, flavour and comfort.

Enjoy: Food Worth Sharing with People You Love by Kelly Gibney is sublime. I love this recipe book so much. The litmus test for a good cookbook is the way the ingredients leap off the page and activate your taste buds. All my favourite ingredients are here in various combinations: pulse, lentils, fresh herbs and vegetables, comfort spices, coconut, yoghurt, stocks, chocolate … and meat for the meat eaters in the family and can be adapted for those who don’t.

What better way to review a cookbook than to cook from it. So my adult daughter and I dived in and made three soups over the weekend to share with my partner/her dad: ‘Red Lentil, Chorizo, Rosemary & Lemon Soup’, ‘A Late Spring Vegetable & White Bean Soup’, and ‘Tortilla Soup’. They were sensational. The recipes are easy to follow and easy to make. The soups were perfect for my energy cup. The layered tastes comforting, nourishing, warming. We declared, after each one, this is the best soup we have tasted in ages! My daughter took photographs to tempt your tastebuds!

Ah! Soup heaven. Next up, my daughter will try some meat recipes, while I am keen to make the broccoli and cheese fritters, the spiced fish tacos, the black bean salad, the broccoli spinach and coconut soup. Recipes are so often springboards as you tweak and pivot to suit – and that is what works so beautifully here.

As I was making the three soups, a poem bubbled and simmered and surfaced. Food and cooking is so entwined with living and feeling, poetry is a perfect form of celebrating it. Thus my soup poem appears above, with all the life and heart connections that arose as I cooked.

Kelly’s fabulous flavoursome Enjoy is now on kitchen replay in our house. Yes it is absolutely food worth sharing with people you love and it is also food worth cooking with people you love. The photographs in the book are so tempting as you can see in the copy open on our stove. I highly recommend it!

Kelly Gibney has appeared on THREE and TVNZ and you will regularly hear her on RNZ. Kelly’s background was previously in hospitality in New York, Melbourne and Auckland. She ahs been a judge for Metro Magazine’s Restaurant Of The Year Awards and enjoys hosting and MCing food and hospitality industry-related events. Her recipes have also been published in the RNZ Cookbook.

Beatnik Publishing page

Photo credit: Sally Bollinger

Transposium, Dani Yourukova, Auckland University Press, 2023

The readings

Dana reads ‘Dark Academia’

Dana reads ‘Date idea: you commit a crime and then I hunt you relentlessly for seventeen years in the single-minded pursuit of bringing you to justice’

Dana reads ‘Everything is going to be fine forever’

Dana reads ‘Love poem for the space you thought to occupy’

Dani Yourukova is a queer Wellington writer with great hair and a bad personality who completed their MA in creative writing at The International Institute of Modern Letters. Their poetry and essays have been published in places such as Starling, Sweet Mammalian, Bad Apple, takahē, Stasis, Turbine | Kapohau and The Spinoff. Their debut collection, Transposium, is part philosophy thesis, part ancient Greek psychosexual fever dream, and it was published by Auckland University Press in October 2023.

Auckland University Press page 

sitting bird

It happens every spring
some infant bird, fat and feathered,
on the vine beside my door
abandoned by its mother
like the inconsolable child in the supermarket aisle
making its shrill insistent cry
come back come back come back come back

either way, you, or make that I, want to say
that’s enough, be quiet now
she’ll soon be back. This morning I watched
a video of children in Gaza, the boys in nappies
carried tiny plastic guns
in the street, the older boys held bigger ones
their aiming eyes looking straight

towards the camera. In a refuge painted green
girls with angel faces and sleekly plaited hair
tell.
They tell
it’s the way their mothers’
heads were blown
off in the fighting

 better they say, to be martyrs, in Paradise
all will be well,
we will be happy there.

more to come/

Words are meant to sustain us.
No longer.
              I tell this bird to cease its clamour     
just be quiet, its unbearable
your mother is coming, she is only
gone this little while, she will feed
you soon, that racket is crowding
out my day, so many voices
come back come back it’s what mothers do

what do we do when there are no longer words
to summon our mothers

Fiona Kidman (November, 2023)

Fiona Kidman DCNZM is a sometime poet, with six books of poems over the past fifty or so years. The last one was This change in the light (Penguin Random House 2015). Her several novels include This Mortal Boy  which won the Jann Medlicott Ockham Book Award for Fiction in 2019.