Photo credit: Kelly Newland
Gina Cole is a fiction writer and essayist of Fijian, Scottish, and Welsh descent. Her writing is inspired by her experiences as a queer Fijian woman. Her debut book of short stories Black Ice Matter (Huia, 2016), won the Hubert Church Prize for Best First Book Fiction at the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her second book Na Viro (Huia Publishers, 2022) is a science fiction fantasy novel set in the distant future and features Pacific culture, placing Gina at the forefront of the new Pasifikafuturism genre. In the week before its launch Na Viro was the second-best selling fiction book in New Zealand.
Gina is a qualified lawyer, with an LLB (Hons) and an MJur from the University of Auckland, and practised law for 27 years. She has a Masters degree in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland and a PhD in Creative Writing from Massey University on the topic of Indigenous science fiction and Pasifikafuturism. In 2014 Gina won the Auckland Pride Festival’s creative writing competition. She is a past participant in the Auckland Writers Festival, and the Same Same But Different LGBTQI+ Festival.
Gina’s work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in numerous publications, including takahē, JAAM, Express Magazine, Span, Landfall, Geometry, The Three Lamps, Ora Nuithe, the essay collection New Writing edited by Thom Conroy, Black Marks on the White Page edited by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti and Out Here: An Anthology of Takatapui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Chris Tse and Emma Barnes.
She is an Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa, and in 2018 Gina was a Writer in Residence at the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska. In 2021 she was a writer-in-residence at the Michael King Writers Centre through a residency for established Pasifika writers and also received the inaugural International Residency with Australia, a partnership between the Michael King Writers Centre and Varuna, The Writers’ House. She receives a month’s residency at Varuna in October 2022 and an appearance at the Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival.
Huia Publishers writer page
NZ Society of Authors writer page
Radio NZ interview discussing Pasifikafuturism and Na Viro (July, 2022)
The Pantograph Punch: article ‘Circling Back’ by Gina about her life (July, 2021)
The Reading Room: short story ‘Sunset on Mars’ (Feb, 2021)
Radio NZ interview and reading discussing the subjects within Black Ice Matter (Oct, 2016)
Stuff review of Black Ice Matter (Sept, 2016)
Na Viro (Huia, 2022)
Black Ice Matter (Short stories: Huia, 2016)
Headland
Geometry
Newsroom
Pantograph Punch
New Writing ([ed. Thom Conroy], Massey UP, 2017)
Black Marks on the White Page ([eds. Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti], RHNZ Vintage, 2017)
Out Here: An Anthology of Takatapui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa New Zealand ([eds. Chris Tse and Emma Barnes], Auckland UP, 2016)
'The thirty-five of us were in the country of dream-merchants, and strange things were bound to happen.' - Anne Kennedy