Chris Tse is a Wellington poet, editor, writer, actor, musician, and occasional filmmaker and is New Zealand/Aotearoa’s current poet laureate 2022-24. His first full length poetry collection How to be dead in a year of snakes (Auckland UP, 2014) received the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry (2016) and was a finalist in the poetry category at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (2016). His poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction have been recorded for radio and widely published in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies. He is also one of three poets in the joint collection AUP New Poets 4 (Auckland UP, 2011). Landfall describes his work as ‘a kind of kaleidoscopic poetic play’ that is both ‘curious and original’.

Chris has appeared in a number of literary festivals, either reading or as part of a panel, both in New Zealand and Australia, and chaired sessions at the National Young Writers Festival in Newcastle and Wellington Writers and Readers (2018).

His award winning collection How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes revisits the 1905 murder of Joe Kum Yung in Haining Street, Wellington, at the hands of noted racist Lionel Terry. The collection weaves together the voices of Joe, Terry and a chorus of witnesses, and asks readers to consider our collective responsibility to remember the dead and the injustices of our past.

A second full-length collection, HE’S SO MASC was published by Auckland University Press in March 2018. HE’S SO MASC confronts a contemporary world of self-loathing poets and compulsive liars, of youth and sexual identity, and of the author as character. Greg O’Brien describes the book as ‘about life: high life, low life, city life, street life, night life, the love life, the gay life. . .‘Staying Alive’ and how to be alive very much in the present tense.  It is a poetry of the raised voice and the raised room temperature. Give me calamity, he exclaims. Give me soul. Faced with the existential predicaments of the era, the poet proclaims: I choose disco.’

Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa (AUP, 2021), is a recent landmark anthology co-edited by Chris Tse and Emma Barnes. It brings together and celebrates queer New Zealand writers from across the gender and LGBTQIA+ spectrum with a generous selection of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction.

Chris’s spirited and confronting new poetry collection Super Model Minority (AUP, 2022) is a riotous walk through the highs and lows of modern life.

 

Links:

Chris Tse’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Auckland University Press author page

Wikipedia Chris Tse

Poetry Foundation poet page

Stuff article announcing Chris Tse as poet laureate 2022 (Aug, 2022)

ANZL review of Super Model Minority (April, 2022)

Radio NZ ‘Nine to Noon’ interview (26 March,2018)