Kelly Ana Morey: 1968–2025

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‘I’ve always been the pain in the ass who wanted to row her own waka in her own way.’

– Kelly Ana Morey

 

 

By Paula Morris

 

Kelly Ana Morey (Ngāti Kurī, Te Rarawa, Te Aupōuri), who died on Monday 1 September aged 57, was many things. Her friend Catherine Chidgey describes her as ‘novelist, historian, photographer, reviewer, and one of the hardest workers I’ve ever known.’ I’d add art writer, stylist, collector, fashion insider, aesthete, gardener, truth-teller, hard case and self-described ‘shit hot waitress’. In her misspent youth she was a denizen of Auckland’s nightlife, a beauty-about-town – after a childhood and adolescence moving between New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, always reading. ‘She was a considerable writer,’ says Elizabeth Aitken-Rose of the Sargeson Trust ‘and, more than this, a fierce, intelligent and enduring contributor to Aotearoa’s evolving cultural life.’

On her Facebook page KAM described herself a different way: ‘Half-assed novelist, animal hoarder and arsonist’. ‘I’ve never really been a joiner,’ she once told scholar Ann Pistacchi. ‘I’ve always known exactly who I am … hard to miss when all your Kaitaia relations are brown as, but I’ve always been the pain in the ass who wanted to row her own waka in her own way.’

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KAM and I met in Wellington in 2001, when both of us were finalists in what is now known as the Pikihuia Awards; our stories were published in a Huia anthology, and I took part in a public reading with KAM and fellow finalist James George. Both KAM and James made themselves cry during their readings and I wondered if this was normal. I returned to the U.S. and we didn’t meet each other again until 2005, at a book launch on Karangahape Road for my second novel, Hibiscus Coast. By then she was publishing abundantly imaginative novels with Penguin, and she seemed sparkling and lively – my kind of writer friend.

When her debut novel, Bloom, won the Hubert Church Award in 2004, KAM was only the fourth Māori – in almost 50 years of the prize – to win, following David Ballantyne (1949), Alan Duff (1991), and me (2003). She’d already been awarded the Todd Young Writers’ Bursary. Her second novel, Grace is Gone, was shortlisted for the international Kiriyama Prize; in the same year, 2005, she won the inaugural Janet Frame Literary Trust Award. In 2014 she was awarded the Māori Writer’s Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. There would be another three novels: On an Island, with Consequences Dire (Penguin 2007), Quinine (Huia 2010) and Daylight Second (HarperCollins 2017), as well as social histories, stories, poems and a childhood memoir – of sorts – called How to Read a Book (Awa Press 2005). She was working on another novel – finished? Almost finished? – when she died.

Like so many writers in New Zealand, KAM had to divide her time to make fiction-writing possible: there were always bills to pay, animals to feed, an old house north of Auckland to fix and renovate. In op-ed for Stuff written in 2017, she described applying for a WINZ benefit two years earlier. ‘Given that I’ve chosen to live rurally and earn a living as a writer/waitress, my financial life could charitably be described as precarious,’ she wrote. ‘Generally I make it – something nearly always seems to come along in the nick of time. But sometimes the wheels can and do fall off my little sideshow.’ Sometimes it was too much. ‘I plant trees, dig drains, feed the animals and shiver as I do my fifth winter without heat,’ she wrote in 2017. ‘And I feel old and broken.’

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Financial need meant she had to take on numerous nonfiction commissions and jobs as an oral historian. In April 2016, she emailed me to say she was ‘at home all week alternating between writing a concise yet entertaining summation of Bay of Islands Maori politics circa 1800 and editing the novel. Yay for editing the novel. I’m tired of the sight of the wretched thing.’ (The novel was Daylight Second, which she was still calling ‘Phar Lap’.) KAM ‘had the rare gift of making art while also juggling the sheer hard graft of making a living,’ says Chidgey, ‘and she never stopped creating’.

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KAM was born in Kaitaia in 1968. Her mother was from Rotorua and of French/German heritage; she had, KAM told scholar Ann Pistacchi, ‘the most magnificent beehive’. Her father was the descendant of a Jewish trader who set up a general store in the Far North and a high-ranking Ngāti Kurī woman. Both parents were talkers and ‘voracious readers’, she recalled in How to Read a Book. But KAM absorbed her ‘mother’s trenchant unhappiness … in a location she never learned to love’. After years in the New Zealand Navy, her father became a shepherd in the Hokianga and then a surveyor, among other things.

The family moved to Papua New Guinea in 1971, where her father worked in various jobs and the family kept moving. It was, she told Pistacchi, ‘the most fabulous childhood. It was quite solitary and in many ways I think a perfect training ground for being a novelist because it taught me to be really happy with only my imagination to keep company with.’ Her mother encouraged her writing and both parents supplied her with books, though these weren’t always easy to find – embracing her identity as a ‘book-worm’ so they could ‘explain my (even then) pronounced singularity,’ she wrote in How to Read a Book. ‘I was not a “friends” kind of child.’ She was happiest with books, dogs and horses, as she would be all her life. She drew on the landscapes and history of Papua New Guinea for her fourth novel, Quinine.

At the age of 12 KAM was sent back to New Zealand to board at New Plymouth Girls’ High School. She preferred the heat and magic of Papua New Guinea and spent her five years at school ‘doing nothing very much in particular,’ she told Pistacchi. Her talent recognised by teachers, she was invited to take part in a special creative writing workshop run by David Hill. Other girls were drawn to her charisma. Auckland writer Karen Holdom arrived at the school in the sixth form and was delighted to be drawn into KAM’s circle.

 

She wasn’t one of the popular girls, the surfy, outdoors, ponytailed lovelies. Those girls couldn’t see what we could, which is that Kelly was the wittiest in the room, the prettiest, the smartest, and the bendiest (her legs and arms folded in impossible knots, those long, bent-back fingers begging a cigarette). She could keep a secret – and did. She was a bit goth, a bit rebellious, but also studious because she couldn’t help herself. She sported with the teachers, and the good ones didn’t mind. My sixteen-year-old self wrote to an expelled fellow student to say life without her would be like haybarns without sex, mountains without Yetis and ‘biology without Kelly Morey.’ The world was just more interesting with her in it.

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KAM repeated her sixth-form year then left for university in Auckland. In a 2022 essay for Reading Room, she described herself as ‘a provincial goth with the requisite spiky bleached blonde hair, heavy make-up, layers of black rags and all-important faux existential ennui’. Her stint in student halls was short – ‘I was a smoker who kept unsociable hours and dubious company’ – and she spent more time working in clubs and restaurants than studying. After ten years of part-time pursuit of a degree in English and Art History, KAM decided to commit. In 1997, Witi Ihimaera and Albert Wendt accepted her into their creative writing class, and her story ‘Māori Bread’ was accepted for publication in the anthology 100 New Zealand Short Short Stories (Tandem). By the time I met her in 2001, she had completed an MA in Art History and was hard at work on Bloom.

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For KAM, Auckland was a glamorous interlude. In her 30s now, joking that she was over-educated and unemployable, KAM returned to the north, and to the countryside. When Ann Pistacchi was writing her doctoral thesis, Morey’s writing career was in its early years but apparently embedded in the north. She talked to Pistacchi about how she liked to ‘write rural communities’ and Pistacchi declared that KAM was ‘anything but an urban dweller. While aspects of her narratives include recognition of violence, poverty, dislocation, and Māori activism, her novels have a decidedly non-urban spirit.’

Certainly, KAM loved her life in the country. She and Catherine Chidgey ‘compared notes on living with messy, sometimes destructive pets’ and Chidgey says she ‘was always moved by the deep love she showed her animals – her horses, hounds and cats.’ KAM considered becoming the Māori rep on the NZSA board but said ‘the travelling ruins it for me’. She preferred to stay at home but in the loop at the same time. Once when I asked her to do something she agreed because ‘my life is a bit slow at the moment as I’m just pottering around at home being a lady novelist’. Another time she agreed because ‘I’m not doing much more than hiding at home and writing ’.

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……………..A few of KAM’s beloved ‘critters’. Photo credit: Kelly Ana Morey.

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In their introduction to the anthology Black Marks on the White Page, Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti talked about KAM’s story as an example of ‘radical ordinariness’, a way of presenting ‘the lives of ordinary people’ and ‘at the same time challenging our understandings about the way things are.’

But she was equally home in the supernatural or mythic. For the 2019 anthology Pūrākau, edited by Ihimaera and Whiti Hereaka, KAM wrote a story called ‘Blind’, imagining the ogress Rūruhi-Kerepō as an inmate of Kingseat mental asylum. The subject, KAM wrote, ‘was the obvious choice for me really.’

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Evil old child-eater! How could I resist? But there were other reasons why I chose her, the main one being there was pretty much nothing written about her so that gave me the opportunity to take her anywhere I wanted, so I did. I also loved that her name translates as ‘old Woman’ and that got me thinking about hierarchies and how to be old, brown and a woman is to have no value.

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As the years between novels stretched, she would think more and more about this. KAM was frank about her prevailing moods; she was given to love-hate relationships. She spent so much time alone that existential crises could settle in her house and in her mind. Sometimes she relished her outsider status. ‘There’s a reason why I’m a writer who doesn’t do the networking thing,’ she told Karen Holdom in 2020. ‘I am simply better by myself, the lit world does my head in’. (Later she told Karen, ‘I get more satisfaction doing beautiful gardens and houses and riding my horse’.) Many of her friendships were conducted virtually. ‘For 15 years we chatted online,’ says Chidgey, ‘a constant thread of conversation that wove through my life. We swapped recommendations for books, good TV and bad TV, interior decorating with antique treasures found on Trade Me or at auction houses.’

 

 

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Some of KAM’s home treasures, including the green wall she often used for a backdrop to photograph her decor collections.

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At other times this isolation led to bitterness and paranoia. KAM could lash out even at friends and supporters, especially when she was feeling professionally or personally overlooked. I’ve been on the receiving end of various lashings. In 2018 a Creative NZ delegation of writers was sent to London to participate in events around the Oceania exhibition at the Royal Academy. The writers were me, Witi Ihimaera, Tina Makereti, Karlo Mila and David Eggleton. KAM was furious that she hadn’t been invited – as an art historian as well as a writer – and vented in public mode on Facebook. I asked her to stop and said it was distressing to read the pile-ons from her followers. ‘Welcome to my world,’ she said.

But the storm always passed with us – or, at least, the whip was set aside for a while – because our issues weren’t personal. We liked each other, and we liked to moan to each other about the writing world, the writing life, the writing. We also relied on each other: I commissioned her to write book reviews and to serve as external examiner for some of my Master of Creative Writing students at the University of Auckland. She almost always said yes, in part because it suggested her judgement was valued. In 2016, when Harley and I were getting the Academy of New Zealand Literature up and running, KAM was a supporter and contributor, writing the ‘appreciation’ for Keri Hulme, interviewing Fiona Kidman and supplying a superb portfolio of photographs for us to use with features and essays.

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Above, a selection from Kelly Ana Morey’s portfolio.

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In 2021, when I asked her to be a fiction judge at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, she agreed at once: ‘I think it’s time to stand up and be counted.’ I really liked that about her. In a country where too many book reviewers will tell you, in private, what they really think, she would write what she thought. ‘Well this isn’t going to make me any friends,’ she told me, submitting review copy for a book by a popular writer. When a publisher had neglected to send her a book, she wrote: ‘Maybe they fear me’.

Also, she always needed money. When I asked her to examine another piece of gloomy realism, she wrote: ‘I’d give a three legged cat for something funny. Sadly I have to pay the last bit of said cat’s horrendous vet bill, so I’ll say yes.’ (‘I tell people, say what you like about Paula,’ she told me once, ‘but she always pays on time’. This was untrue: often I don’t pay on time. Also, I hadn’t realised ‘people’ were nasty about me. Welcome to my world.)

Like all friends and writers, we had in-jokes, and we sometimes complained about each other. In 2019, she told a mutual friend that ‘your friend St Paula takes all the Māori money’. This had been a running joke between me and KAM for years, dating back to some parody CNZ letters I wrote in the personae of other writers. (‘Please send me all the Māori money.’) But she emailed me when my father died, and when I was getting abuse from someone, she wrote: ‘Jesus what the hell is wrong with people.’ Once she told me that some writers couldn’t ‘take ‘KAM’s brutal truth’, and that became one of our favourite lines.

We also emailed and commiserated about the expectations and demands made of Māori fiction writers. Everyone should read her Spinoff essay from 2017, written not long after her own father died, about being ‘a Māori. In my own funny way.’ It examines KAM’s feeling of isolation within the prevailing Māori narratives. ‘I can’t be the “Māori” writer people want me to be,’ she wrote; ‘all I can be is myself. Mining the Māori world for material would somehow feel like an act of theft because my knowledge and connection feel so slight and arbitrary.

 

This is why I don’t write from the Māori perspective all that often in my fiction, and if I do those characters tend to be quarter-cast who are like me a little disconnected. They operate as individuals rather than cultural representatives. There are no marae visits or lovingly written tangi in my New Zealand novels. There’s the odd visitation from a ghost or two but every culture has that going on. And the narratives are concerned with the here and now of surviving and knowing who you are and being okay with that. The complicated world of identity and authenticity which challenges those of us who are neither one nor the other. So I shuffle between my realms, the problem child no one really wants.

 

That sense of herself as ‘problem child’ extended to our small literary world. Relationships with publishers were not always good; KAM often felt unsupported and ‘silenced’. She took rejections badly, writing in 2017 that she’d ‘written countless futile Creative New Zealand and writers’ residency applications’. That year, joining Auckland Museum’s oral history team and offered a writing contract by another museum, she wrote: ‘So after six years in the wilderness I’m back on track. See if Waikato Uni had given me their residency instead of my fifth rejection from them, none of this would have happened. Well done cow college.’ It took many, many applications to get the Sargeson Fellowship, in part because KAM would announce that she just wanted the money, not use of the writing residency on Albert Park. (She was awarded the residency – at last – in 2023.) Even when she got grants, she could complain. ‘I’ve only just got myself back into CNZ good books,’ she told me in 2015. There ‘have been far too many times in the last 6 years when it’s been a bit like the siege of Leningrad for me to shut the hell up and take my hush money’.

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For someone so prickly, KAM was amenable about being edited, whether I was re-structuring a review or giving feedback on the fiction she submitted for inclusion in my anthology Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories. But she could drive me crazy. Each year the ANZL sends an ‘author showcase’ to hundreds of festival directors around the world, looking for international opportunities for New Zealand writers. After Daylight Second was published, a festival expressed interest in KAM. ‘Durban hosts the biggest horse race in South Africa,’ I wrote to her. They would pay for her airfare and hotel and give her a meal allowance. She made plans. ‘I have a week off work and critter sitter jacked up … now all I need is some anxiety meds, a passport and one more animal put to death’. I confirmed with the festival. And then she cancelled, saying ‘my spooky old lady skills aren’t happy about this one’.

But she was, as Chidgey says, ‘the one and only Kelly Ana Morey’ – funny, frustrating, smart and smarting. ‘Kelly was devoted to writing even though she knew it wasn’t good for her,’ says Steve Braunias, a long-time friend and admirer of her work. ‘There were a lot of disappointments and setbacks and general punishments, but she kept coming back for more.’ She could be angry or sad, but she was not deterred. KAM ‘needed to write,’ she wrote in the Spinoff, ‘because aside from thinking deep thoughts and waitressing, I’m not terrible good at anything else’. She also enjoyed making trouble: ‘I’m off to poke some tigers with a stick’.

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As well as career setbacks, KAM suffered from ongoing physical pain. We asked each other a lot about health issues, but mine were just injuries and surgeries. KAM had Crohn’s Disease, and what she once told me was three decades of a ‘constant low grade chronic gut pain’. In passing she would mention ‘my last bowel resection’, but the most important thing was to get ‘back on a horse six weeks after’ and be able to work in her garden. She couldn’t come to the launch of Hiwa in 2023 because apart ‘from being a hermit I have the Covid. Fark. It’s been awful. Even getting dressed is a mission.’ This July she told me she’d been ‘battling influenza’ for a month.

On 19 August, she emailed me from Whangarei Hospital to say she was in intensive care; this meant she couldn’t get a book review finished. I asked her if she needed anything and she asked: ‘Can you post me some lollies. I’m desperate for snacks’. My old school friend Sally Wilkinson, who lives in Waipu, drove up two days later with the requested wine gums, jellies and M&Ms. ‘The absolute joy of lollies,’ KAM wrote. ‘Thank you so much for the lolly fairy.’

A week later:

KAM: On my way home this afternoon. feel better than i have done for months.

Me: I hope you have more energy, you poor thing!

KAM: I still have a way to go yet. I could probably get that book reviewed for you.

Me: Only when you feel up to it. There is a contract for you to sign as well, perhaps?

KAM: Oh yes and I need to confirm my bank account.

That was our final exchange. ‘Brave little Kelly walked a hard road,’ Braunias says. ‘New Zealand literature was the better for it. I will miss her very much.’ Chidgey says: ‘KAM’s extraordinary novels leave a legacy that speaks to her rich imagination and her tireless dedication to storytelling; her non-fiction projects show the same intelligence and commitment to the written word. I will so miss her conversation, her support and her friendship.’

I will miss her wit and her brutal truth. Two years ago, she told me: ‘I’ve counted up my lives and KAM the cat has four more left’. None of us thought those lives would be used up so soon. ‘The fires will continue to smoulder with or without me,’ she wrote in the Spinoff in 2017, calling out to ‘a group of incredibly well-educated, talented Māori women storytellers who take no prisoners and offer no apology for who they are and what and how they write’.

We will keep the fires going, KAM.

 

 

Links to KAM reviews on the Aotearoa Review of Books:

21 May 2025: Tina Makereti: This Compulsion In Us

11 April 2025: Whiti Hereaka and Peata Larkin: You Are Here

8 November 2024: Monty Soutar: Kāwai: Tree of Nourishment

6 September 2024: Kirsty Baker: Sight Lines

3 April 2024: Lauren Keenan: The Space Between

18 August 2023: Airana Ngarewa: The Bone Tree

 

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Still Waters Run Deep

John McCrystal on the imaginative life and legacy of Maurice Gee.

 

The last time I saw Maurice Gee, he was literally wearing a grey cardigan. And slacks, and comfortable shoes and a wry, wary look. He was skulking (if that’s the right word) towards the back of a small-ish crowd attending a launch in our little, local bookshop. He blended in perfectly, and looking around the room, you might have mistaken him for the guy who would raise a tentative hand after the speeches and readings and politely ask the author where they got their ideas from.

I recognised him because I’d had the pleasure of interviewing him a week before. I was moderately surprised to see him, because during that interview, he had told me that he had pretty much nothing to do with ‘the book business’ anymore: whereas he’d always kept a low profile, he had now all but given interviews and festival appearances and readings away. His twelfth novel for adults – Ellie and the Shadowman – had emerged a matter of days beforehand, but this wasn’t his launch. I don’t recall whose launch it was, but Maurice, kind as ever, was there to show solidarity for a fellow author.

If there is a recurring theme in the press surrounding Gee, particularly in the latter years of his career and in the eulogism since his death last week, it is that he seemed so ‘ordinary’ (‘unassuming’, a ‘man in a grey cardie’) for someone who had produced such an extraordinary body of work. Damien Wilkins (who, curiously, I’ve always thought looks a bit like the younger Maurice Gee) has spoken and written about his resemblance to the archetypical (Pākehā) Kiwi bloke in early author photos: sleeves rolled up, ready for manual rather than intellectual labour. As he aged, he became indisputably avuncular. As he aged further, he began to look positively grandfatherly.

He looked mild and grandfatherly when I met him in person in 2001, and was moved to ask him, as so many interviewers had before me and have since, where he got his ideas from – those dark, haunting scenes in his writing featuring sex, violence, physical and psychological torment, and death. Sitting there in his cardie and slippers in his modest home on the slopes of Wellington’s Ngaio, he pretended to take the question seriously. It was only when I asked what his wife, Margaretha, thought of this kind of subject material that he raised an eyebrow and laughed nervously: Margaretha was in earshot. ‘You’d have to ask her,’ he said.

 

 

It wasn’t as silly a question as it sounds. Because while Maurice looked about as unlikely to inflict harm or do ill as any human being alive, he spent his entire writing life preoccupied by the evil that men (and women, but mostly men) do.

Maurice Gough Gee was born in Whakatāne in 1931 and shifted to Newington Road in Henderson — then a hamlet lying to the west of Auckland city — when he was an infant, the middle child of three brothers. He moved away from his childhood home in his early twenties, but psychologically speaking, he never really left. He acknowledged that his emotional landscape comprised the warmth and safety of home (especially the kitchen, his mother’s domain), and the chill and darkness of the larger (mostly masculine) world, as epitomised by the creek that ran past the Gee family property.

The creek gave him wonderful memories — an adventure he and one of his brothers had, descending from Henderson to the Waitematā Harbour in homemade canoes — but he also nearly drowned in it, and saw a young man fatally break his neck when diving into a swimming hole at low tide. In 2009, he told Stuff’s Grant Smithies that he ‘couldn’t seem to get away from Henderson Creek. It runs right through my imaginative life.’ And so it does. Anyone who has swum in murky water with a creeping sense of unease at what lies beneath will recognise the same sensation evoked in Gee’s work.

After starting out as a writer of poetry, Gee soon moved to short fiction, with many of his stories collected in A Glorious Morning, Comrade, published in 1976. By the time this collection emerged, he had already published two novels (which he later described dismissively as ‘apprentice novels’): The Big Season (1962) and A Special Flower (1965). Apprenticeship duly served, it was as a novelist that he was to make his name. In My Father’s Den (1972) won him critical acclaim and a publishing contract with the prestigious UK house, Faber, with whom he had a long and fruitful association. His fourth novel, Plumb, based on the character of his austere maternal grandfather James Chapple (and the first in a trilogy) was published in 1978 and is probably his best-known and most widely admired.

Between then and 2009, when Access Road, his last, emerged, Gee published a novel every two or three years, for a total of 17. Many won awards (including several incarnations of the top fiction prize), Gee held a number of literary fellowships (including the prestigious Menton fellowship in 1992) and was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2004. Few writers could boast they have had an entire literary festival named after one of their works (Going West). He was regarded as one of New Zealand’s best writers (if not the best), and hailed as a major figure in wider English letters: he was even mentioned as a possible nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature — but it was thought that Janet Frame ought to be nominated first.

 

 

In genre terms, Gee was a realist. He was a master at evoking place and capturing the temper of times, even times that were not his own (Edwardian New Zealand in Plumb, New Zealand during World War II in Live Bodies). But it was people he did better than anyone. A man whom he befriended in the course of researching the nefarious business of property development for his 1994 novel Crime Story wrote to him that Gee’s ‘ability to see into people’s souls is becoming a bit frightening.’ This was acute, because that is precisely what his talent comprised: the ability to see human beings in the round, and then to capture them in his economical, limpid prose. Love, loathe, admire or despise them, it’s hard to see his characters as anything but real people.

This is certainly the way he saw them. When I talked to him about Ellie, the main protagonist in Ellie and the Shadowman, it was like discussing a mutual acquaintance; I was struck by how he spoke of her as though she were someone he had got to know rather than made up — as though there were aspects of her that baffled even him. Similarly, talking to an interviewer about the property developer character in Crime Story, for example, Gee said that he ‘didn’t like’ Howie, but there were some aspects of him that he admired. It may well be the case that his characters were made up of familiar and well-handled fragments of his own and of those of people he had known, but once he had stitched them together and thrown the switch to send the current of his imagination coursing through them, they fairly walked and breathed.

If realism was the strength of his novels, it was realistic fantasy that enabled Gee to forge an equally illustrious career as a writer for children and young adults. He published (by my count) 13 books for children, and won awards for these as well. While it can be presumptuous to declare anything to be ‘a classic’, a number of his children’s books are indisputably classics: Under the Mountain was acclaimed at the time (1979) and has endured, as has the trilogy comprising The Halfmen of O (1982), The Priests of Ferris (1984) and Motherstone (1985). Gee had the gift of taking his young readers seriously, probably because his own childhood still seemed so immediate to him. Even his fantastic landscapes feel familiar, and his characters find themselves in recognisable moral dilemmas. My 16-year-old daughter (who was stricken when I told her just now that Gee had died), appreciates the way he creates fantasy worlds in the New Zealand landscape (‘I wish I had a pair of magic glasses!’).

And in Gee’s view, you’re never too young to experience creeping unease. The creek! The malevolent wilberforces gnawing at the earth beneath suburban tranquility! The darkness in humanity of which children are mostly, but not completely, innocent. Gee understood the way young people confront and make sense of the world, something I felt when reading his 1990 (adult) novel, The Burning Boy. There is a scene where teenaged Hayley meets her boyfriend (who physically attracts and morally repels her) at a swimming spot, Freak’s Hole. She gives Gary a handjob as they bob about in the pool, but is suspicious as to why he has invited his two unsavoury friends along as well. Her fears are realised when the three boys attack her. She fights her way out of the situation, but afterwards it hits her how dire the danger is that she has just escaped. I recall how alone she seemed to me as I read it, negotiating the possibilities and perils of the world.

 

 

It’s hard to say how Maurice Gee’s oeuvre will cellar. Perhaps his junior fiction will endure, as the update Under the Mountain was given in Jonathan King’s 2009 movie would suggest. As for his adult novels, it’s harder to say. Even in his prime, he was becoming unfashionable. Realism was ceding ground to post-modernism and experimentation with the form, such that Gee’s novels look conventional to the point of being old-fashioned when viewed through a contemporary lens.

What’s more, I was always surprised that whereas Owen Marshall seemed to attract the label of ‘provincialism’, Gee largely escaped it: he was unashamed of the ‘New Zealandy’ settings and sensibility of his fiction. But the New Zealand with which he was familiar and to which he returns in his fiction again and again has all but vanished, too. He grew up in a broadly conformist society, for the most part deeply sectarian, where even if you rejected religion (as Gee did), this was still to define yourself in relation to it. The New Zealand Gee grew up in seems somehow closer to George Plumb’s reality than to our own. By the mid-1980s, we were becoming conspicuously secular, and this trend has accelerated. Morality itself may have shifted. Gee was often accused of ‘puritanism’ and ‘moralism’.

I asked him if he considered his outlook to have been shaped by puritanism, but we ended up talking past each other. When in his memoir he described his young self as a puritan, he was referring to an adolescent’s horror of his emerging sexuality, and denial that there might be a female equivalent, whereas I thought I had identified in Crime Story a collision between the ‘decent’ communitarian values Gee grew up with and the flashy individualism that was emerging in the 1990s. (I thought I saw the same unease in some of the stories in Owen Marshall’s collection, Coming Home in the Dark, published around the same time: the crumbling of moral conventions as reflected in ‘Flute and Chance’ and the collection’s sublime and horrifying title story. Gee was intrigued by this hypothesis, but not convinced).

Karl Stead accused him of being too judgmental towards his own characters (as in the mingled dislike and admiration towards Howie referred to earlier). Gee himself said he ‘didn’t mind’ being thought of as a moralist. But I wonder whether this moralism itself will date his work, in a world that has only got flashier and more individualistic. And, of course, Gee was living and working in a New Zealand dominated by Pākehā men, and his work reflected his experience. As Ellie and the Shadowman showed, he was capable of writing the female perspective with conviction, but the bulk of his work is palpably masculine. In his fiction, he deliberately chose not to engage with the Māori renaissance that was gathering steam throughout his career, whereas more recent writers have turned to confront the shadow on the margins of New Zealand society, our colonial past.

Time will tell.

I would be hard pressed to name my favourite Gee novel. I admire Plumb (the book, and the trilogy, although I think I like the last, Meg, the most). Going West was one of the first I read, and would be up there. But I think, for me, Live Bodies was his finest work, where he simply nailed the character (of course) and especially the voice of Josef Mandl.

I would also commend Rachel Barrowman’s 2015 biography, Maurice Gee: Life and Work as a fascinating study in the alchemy by which a writer’s experience is rendered into fictional gold. Gee expressed satisfaction with it. And just as fascinating in light of Barrowman’s is Gee’s own memoir, Memory Pieces, not least for the intriguing choices he made as to what he included, what he left out.

Nearly a third of what is supposed to be his memoir is actually a telling of Margaretha’s story. The two were together for well over half a century, and Gee credits her with creating the conditions he needed to be as prolific as he was. She was never a ‘kitchen person’, he said, but she created the security of his childhood kitchen from which he could venture out to explore the creek. They made a wonderful match, and it is sad that it has ended. I loved the story Barrowman recounts of how Maurice and Margaretha sold their Nelson house to move into a retirement village, only to find they hated it. They managed to buy their house back again. (I loved that Damien Wilkins used the story in his 2024 novel, Delirious, and I’m sure Maurice would have been delighted, too). Gee often complained that he was ‘no good’ at endings, but it is the way of things that even the greatest of novelists, like all good things, must eventually reach an end. Maurice Gee was 93. Haere, haere, haere rā.

 

 

Read Sue Orr’s portrait of Maurice Gee here.

 

** Feature header image from Portrait of author Maurice Gee. Graham, Reginald Kenneth, 1930-2007 :Photographs of prominent New Zealanders. Ref: PAColl-6458-1-08. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23121102

‘What did I miss?’ Ten years of the Ockhams

The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards celebrates its tenth anniversary. Paula Morris takes notes and makes disclosures.

Last year at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, the Prime Minister took some flak from some writers and audience members – including fiction finalist Pip Adam, who read a pointed defence of Te Tiriti. To avoid a repeat this year, the Hon. Paul Goldsmith, Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage (historian and biographer of John Banks and Don Brash, among others), made a short speech and then a swift exit through the stage door, before any awards were handed out.

He was probably home long before Damien Wilkins – winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction for his novel Delirious – managed to run onto the stage. It was almost 9 PM; host Miriama Kamo asked Nigel Gavin’s on-stage band to fill time after the fiction announcement, checking her phone to tell us Wilkins was hurtling his way from Auckland airport. Air New Zealand was the unexpected villain of the day: mechanical issues with an early-afternoon plane stranded Wilkins in Wellington airport for five hours and kept poetry sponsors Mary and Peter Biggs from flying up at all. (Wilkins’ wife, slumming it on Jetstar, arrived in plenty of time.) ‘What did I miss?’ Wilkins joked.

Some big hints, as people noted during the event’s after-party. All the non-awards speeches – including one by Ockham Residential founder Mark Todd, usually an event closer – were moved up to the start of the ceremony, possibly to buy time for the $65,000 winner. During the fiction category citation, Thom Conroy, the judging convenor, paused to ask if Wilkins had arrived yet. He hadn’t: his publisher and longtime friend Fergus Barrowman, of Te Herenga Waka University Press, did the reading on Wilkins’ behalf and accepted the award – a bright turquoise acorn – for him as well. ‘I’m still not Damien,’ he said, adding that Delirious was his favourite of all Wilkins’ novels.

Wilkins, who gave a thoughtful and generous speech, was a popular and deserving winner. ‘Delirious has a lot of what you’d expect from Wilkins,’ wrote Laura Borrowdale on the Aotearoa NZ Review of Books. ‘It’s a novel that’s about “something”, that has intellectual meat on its plot bones, beautiful writing, and a very, very New Zealand setting.’

This was the tenth anniversary of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, celebrated with a pacey ceremony, an expert host, and explosions of gold streamers at the end. It was also the 57^th anniversary of our national book awards in one of its many previous incarnations. Paul Goldsmith noted that the first novel to ever win at these awards – not including best first book – was Smith’s Dream by C. K. Stead, in 1972. ‘He’s still here,’ said Goldsmith, and indeed he was, looking rakish in his striped scarf, a poetry finalist for his collection In the Half Light of a Dying Day. Aged 92, Stead is also the oldest-ever finalist in these national book awards, but this year the poetry prize went to the youngest of the four finalists, Emma Neale (born in 1969), for her superb collection Liar, Liar, Lick, Split.

In Wilkins’ speech, he joked that when he last won at these awards – in 1994, for his debut novel, The Miserables – all of New Zealand literature could fit in a small room, on a few pieces of furniture, their names on a one-page list. Times have changed. The number of submissions for the Ockhams this year sounded like a record: 55 books in General Nonfiction, 53 in Fiction, 37 in Poetry and 30 in the most glamorous (and expensive) category, Illustrated Nonfiction. The finalists in each category climbed onto the stage to read short excerpts from their books. In most categories, this meant four people. In Illustrated Nonfiction it was ten, (almost) all the writers and editors who created the four contending books. (Illustrated Nonfiction finalists also get a slide show.)

Neither of the nonfiction awards were a surprise, despite the strength of competition in both categories. Toi te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art (Auckland University Press) by Māori art historians Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) and Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) – (disclosure 1: they are my colleagues at University of Auckland). The book is so heavy – 600 pages! – the authors had to offload it onto publisher Sam Elworthy before sharing the podium for their acceptance speech. It’s ‘an outstanding contribution to Māori culture, arts and creativity,’ writes Maia Nuku (Ngāi Tai), Oceanic Arts curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Category convenor Chris Szekely described it as a book ‘of enduring significance’, begun 14 years ago by the late Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (Ngāpuhi, Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kurī).

The General Nonfiction winner was Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku for her stunning coming-of-age memoir Hine Toa – ‘an important book,’ I wrote in a review published on the ANZRB and in shortened form in the Listener, describing it as ‘vital to write, vital to publish and vital to read’. Ngāhuia gave an eloquent speech, though she was trembling and said she was ‘feeling rather shattered’; her partner celebrated the win in the aisle with a haka.

At the end of her memoir, Ngāhuia asks: ‘What became of the revolution?’ Perhaps because of the absence of Prime Ministers at this year’s event, writers with a turn at the microphone said less about our own society and political issues, though nonfiction finalist Una Cruikshank – in her speech after winning best first book – gave a shout-out to her ‘anarchist friends in the audience and ended with ‘Free Palestine!’ Badges seemed the preferred protest mode: Te Tiriti, Palestine, the Rainbow flag. I asked poetry judge, the always-eclectic David Eggleton, about his badge. ‘It’s the old five-cent coin,’ he told me. (There’s a poem called ‘The Five Cent Coin’ in his 2009 collection Time of the icebergs.)

Most finalists wore black, though possibly without symbolism. Cruikshank wore black lace gloves but a bright dress (with panniers) that included Day-of-the-Dead skulls. Lawrence Fearnley, a fiction finalist, wore mountain-climbing boots, as though she had just stepped from the pages of her own novel. Robert Sullivan, a poetry finalist, held a Māori mouth flute he’s learning to play ‘like a cigar’, he said, in tribute to his smoker father. Emma Neale apologised that her speech was ‘a shitty first draft’. Mark Todd, in his sponsor’s speech, apologised because his most recent read was not local. It was East of Eden by John Steinbeck. (‘Fuck, it’s good.)

Last night the four Best First Book winners were announced: these awards include the oldest in New Zealand: the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry, first awarded in 1941, and the Hubert Church Prize for Fiction, established in 1945. They are now sponsored by the Mātatuhi Foundation (disclosure 2: I’m a trustee and also a past winner of the Hubert Church); the prize includes membership of the New Zealand Society of the Authors, a tribute to the NZSA’s important role in establishing both the Mackay and Church awards (disclosure 3: I’m a longtime NZSA member and former President of Honour). The NZSA included an insert on the history of these prizes in the Ockhams programme: the QR code, which we’ll add to the ANZL site, leads readers to a complete list of winners back to the 1940s.

The winners this year include two first books that were finalists in the main nonfiction categories: Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa and Una Cruickshank’s The Chthonic Cycle. The fiction winner was Michelle Rahurahu (Ngāti Rahurahu, Ngāti Tahu–Ngāti Whaoa) for her debut novel Rahurahu; the poetry winner was Manuali’I by Rex Letoa Paget. All the best-first-book winners were published by university or small independent presses. In fact, only one of the night’s eight winners, across all categories, was published by a multinational trade publisher – Hine Toa, published by HarperCollins NZ. This isn’t a surprise for a category like poetry, but with the other categories could reflect the increasingly commercial exigencies of the multinationals based here.

Penguin Random House used to be a major publisher of New Zealand fiction: will that continue with its reduced staff and local list? Only one Penguin fiction title made this year’s longlist: Fearnley’s At the Grand Glacier Hotel, also a finalist. Newcomer Moa Press, part of Hachette NZ, had two books on the fiction longlist: Shilo Kina’s All That We Know and Saraid de Silva’s debut novel Amma (disclosure 4: I run the Master of Creative Writing programme where de Silva wrote the first draft of this novel.)

Usually the Ockham NZ Book Awards are followed by social media complaints that memoirs and essays are overlooked in favour of Serious History, and that the General Nonfiction category should be split to ensure more space for creative nonfiction. In fact, six of the ten nonfiction winners in the Ockhams era have been creative nonfiction. This year none of the finalists were ‘straight’ history; the main award was for a memoir and the best first book was for an essay collection.

So let me raise a different issue for a different category. Saraid de Silva was the only Asian NZ writer on the fiction longlist. Overlooked this year were The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat by past finalist Brannavan Gnanalingam and when I open the shop, the imaginative debut novel from Romesh Dissanayake. Last year’s fiction longlist included one Asian NZ novel, Emma Ling Sidnam’s debut Backwaters (disclosure 5: Alison Wong and I included work by de Silva, Dissanayake and Sidnam in our anthology A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand.) Like de Silva, Sidnam was a contender for best first book (fiction) but did not win. The only Asian fiction writer to win at our national book awards remains my co-editor Alison Wong, for As the Earth Turns Silver in 2010.

As Damien Wilkins says, New Zealand literature has changed since 1992; it keeps changing, and growing more expansive and diverse. New stories, fresh voices, different audiences. Our national book prize judges began recognising Asian NZ poets in 2016 when Chris Tse won the Jessie Mackay Prize for his debut How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes. Chinese Fish by Grace Yee won the Peter and Mary Biggs Award for Poetry in 2024. Joanna Cho was a poetry finalist in 2023, Nina Mingya Powles in 2021. The absences in fiction prizes begin to look egregious.

 

From left to right: Damien Wilkins (Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction), Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (General Nonfiction), Emma Neale (Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry), Ngarino Ellis and Deidre Brown (BookHub Award for Illustrated Nonfiction). Photo credit: LK Creative.

 

The Ockham NZ Book Awards: Fiction Round Table 2025

This year’s finalists for the $65,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction are Laurence Fearnley (At the Grand Glacier Hotel), Kirsty Gunn (Pretty Ugly), Tina Makereti (The Mires) and Damien Wilkins (Delirious). Thom Conroy, convenor of the fiction judges, said: ‘Whether set in the Scottish Highlands, at the Fox Glacier, or on the Kāpiti Coast, each of these finalists evoked a visceral and often lyrical sense of place.’

Laurence Fearnley’s novel At the Grand Glacier Hotel is the third in a series based on the five senses: this book explores the experience of sound. A woman recovering from cancer surgery finds herself marooned in a historic hotel, cut off by a storm from her partner and the outside world. The novel, ‘set within the extraordinary environment of south Westland, is a riveting account of human frailty told with clarity and insight,’ wrote reviewer Sally Blundell. Laurence has won the overall fiction prize in a previous incarnation of the book awards, for The Hut Builder in 2011.

Kirsty Gunn last won the fiction prize at our national book awards in 2013, with her novel The Big Music. Her story collection Pretty Ugly is her third, and the inaugural title in a new short stories series published by Landfall and Otago University Press. It’s a book that reveals  ‘an abiding imaginative and intellectual curiosity about the possibilities of storytelling’, John Prins wrote in the Aotearoa NZ Review of Books. The ‘stories in Pretty Ugly will enhance her reputation as revolutionary and help to expand the boundaries of Aotearoa’s contemporary literature into new and interesting places’.

Tina Makereti is shortlisted for her third novel, The Mires. It ‘is set in a post-lockdown, not-too-distant time – a wā that could conceivably be any day from now,’ Natasha Lampard wrote in Kete Books. ‘It is a story of what it means to be at home: in this world, on this body of land, this body of water. And what it means to be at home in ourselves.’ Tina’s first collection of essays, This Compulsion in Us, is published this month.

Damien Wilkins has published 10 novels over thirty years. Delirious, wrote reviewer Laura Borrowdale, ‘has a lot of what you’d expect from Wilkins – a book that’s about ‘something’, that has intellectual meat on its plot bones, beautiful writing, and a very, very New Zealand setting’. In the novel, a couple wrangle with the implications of aging, and the ghosts and grief of the past: they ‘must decide how much they let the past into their present’. Damien won the fiction prize at our national book awards in 1994, for his debut novel The Miserables.

The conversation – with occasional questions from Paula Morris – was conducted remotely in April 2025. All four writers will appear at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards on Wednesday 14 May, during the Auckland Writers Festival.

 

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Paula: Welcome to our 2025 round table. You are all established fiction writers, authors of multiple books (with, in some cases, excursions into nonfiction as well). Would you each talk about your shortlisted book and how it follows – or departs – from what you’ve published before?

Laurence: Thanks, Paula. My novel belongs to a series I began in 2019 based on the five senses. The original idea came from walks on Signal Hill (Dunedin) and scent mapping the routes I took. I wanted to approach landscape in a new way – through scent rather than sight. Thus a visually ‘ugly’ area could be appreciated for its beautiful or complex scent. The original pieces I wrote were nonfiction (for the Massey University Press anthology Home and the Landfall Essay Competition (Landfall 234, The perfume Counter). 

My first novel was Scented, then Winter Time (touch) and At the Grand Glacier Hotel (sound). The sound element comes through in both descriptions of the natural and human world, and also in silences. I’ve finished the fourth novel, Dedication, based on sight, and am working on Rivers (taste). I like writing detail, and am most interested in creating immersive (tonal, atmospheric) works where plot is secondary. So, the five senses project has been enjoyable for that reason.

 

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Kirsty: I love what Laurence just said about using different senses. I do think that, as writers,  it’s interesting to ‘sense’ our work differently with each project. That prevents it becoming stale, in my view – and keeps every new book of fiction fresh, a new idea, a new approach. With this latest collection of stories of mine, Pretty Ugly, I wanted to really test how far I could inoculate myself, as it were, against the horrors of late capitalism and a ghastly political situation that meant right wing thinking and authoritarianism was on the rise. 

So I worked very deliberately to create stories with truly awful people and situations…as a way of thinking them through – allowing these awful things, as it were – and so protect myself, I suppose, and my reader – I hope! – against what was going on in the world…Is what I mean by inoculation, perhaps. To face up to this stuff –  acknowledge it’s there, to think about it, that it exists – amongst the loveliness that is also this world. That deliberate kind of ‘making’, of fashioning something out of the contemporary situation that I could use for ethical purposes … That felt very new to me.
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Tina: Kia ora tātou. I knew about Laurence’s series based on the senses, which I always thought was a very cool idea, and something I couldn’t imagine planning. It wasn’t until I had finished The Mires that I realised it might in fact be the final part of what seems to me to be a kind of trilogy that attempts to think through questions around racism, identity and community. Publishing The Mires felt like I’d come to the end of something more than just the book. I think I’ve come to the end of talking about identity and race head-on. I had thought I was writing very different things, but as our wise friend Lynn Jenner once said, ‘the end of one book is just the beginning of the next’.

But my novels are definitely three very different approaches to those kaupapa. I always want to do something technically different and challenging, and even though I have these big kaupapa questions, the only way to get at them is through character, so nothing can really emerge until they do. Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings is multiple-perspective, multiple timeline book that asks how we understand what happened to Moriori on Rēkohu through the experiences of five different characters; The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke is a first-person account of a fictional Māori character who is taken to London to be exhibited, and encounters the savage world of early Victorian England; and The Mires is narrated by the roving perspective of the Swamp, who comes very close to the points of view of a group of characters in the very near future, as they grapple with the same tensions and dangers that we are unfortunately facing right now in a very real way.

 

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Laurence: All your novels also have a very strong sense of place, and what it means to belong (or not) in that space, which is something I also found interesting when reading Damien’s Delirious. Both this and The Mires are set in the same part of the country, and they almost seem like companion pieces. Yours has a sense of majesty and vastness, a primal quality whereas Damien’s is more of a domestic-scale, human-ordered landscape, but they both examine community, and who gets to live where, and how to come to terms with being part of, or within, this land.

Damien: My previous two novels had dealt respectively with a young mother (Lifting) and a middle-aged father (Dad Art). I hadn’t ever told a story from an old person’s perspective. Immediately this makes it seem a bit cool and calculated. Really I was overtaken by a bunch of real life events which pressed against me and my writing. My mother had delirium which became dementia; my father had a stroke. The collapse of agency was startling. I mean, intellectually I knew it – bodies and minds fail – but it was suddenly all very personal. In this hideous three-parter, my older sister had died a few years before. 

Delirious was where I tried to put a lot of this stuff. Not that it’s gone anywhere. I guess that your novel, Laurence, has similar pressures on it. The funny thing about making a novel out of this material is that although these strong feelings of pain and grief can seem all-consuming, they aren’t enough for the novel. You’ve still got to figure out things like scenes and a time-line and narrative shape and tone. You’re suffering but you’re also methodically working away at this strange craft. 

 

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Laurence: I’d reread The Pilgrim’s Progress when I was sick and became very interested in the idea of carrying a burden. That book deals with faith, and the burden of sin, but I was more interested in the aspect of a physical burden, or a burden that strikes the body, and how to negotiate that through going on a physical ‘walking’ pilgrimage, aided by a stranger. I’ve noticed my characters are aging as I’ve aged and I guess I’m more tuned in to decline (physical, mental). I’m wondering if writing about your personal experience, Damien, was cathartic in any way; if it helped you make sense of things that were happening to your family? Mine was the opposite experience; writing was pretty bleak. I put that down to what you were saying about making a novel out of life experiences. With a novel you have to re-work, edit, re-read, polish. While that might make for a better book, it doesn’t necessarily help with ‘pain’. But maybe it did with you? And Tina: Your novel deals with heavy issues and material and I imagine that must take quite a toll.

Tina: You’re such a generous reader, Laurence. I find there’s a paradox for me in the writing – it’s not really hard on me emotionally – it’s definitely more like being lifted out of the heavy place. Writing brings me such a sense of connection and elevation. It’s a place where I feel like I’m part of something so much greater than me. The hard stuff is always with me in everyday life, and sometimes research is shattering, so writing actually relieves the painful nature of being alive. I can be writing about the painful thing or not, and it works just the same. Very rarely, I write something that makes me feel angrier. Then I know it’s too fresh to write about yet. 

I’m sorry At the Grand Glacier Hotel was difficult in that way, Laurence. Having said all of the above, I don’t know if I could write a whole novel about someone with cancer without finding it very difficult. Writing doesn’t leave many places to hide! 

Kirsty: I’m interested in the way we all seem to be circling around this idea of making art – that is, writing our novels and short stories – alongside living alongside them, inside them … living our lives. That we are engaged in the business of what it FEELS like to make these books, what they’ve come out, where they seem to want to go. I love that. I love the idea of this kind of … living writing. That these are not books sitting over there, as ‘entertainments’ as Katherine Mansfield described that kind of writing. 

No. These books of ours, as we are talking about them, are not spectacles in any way… But are part of our living, breathing worlds. Oh yes. That appeals to me hugely. That one can be a living writer, and not just some person who’s done the research, or who’s come up with the idea and now has a book to show for it. That we are all, instead, it seems, interested in this other thing, a kind of organic fiction.

Damien: I can’t say writing the novel was cathartic for me. (I’m envious about your feeling of elevation, Tina.) I am gratified that the novel has found readers and they felt something. Reading might be different. I remember reading Annie Ernaux’s amazing short memoir about the last period of her mother’s life, I Remain in Darkness. The title is a bit of a giveaway! She’s recording these details of her mother’s decline and her own difficult feelings about their relationship and she’s horrified by what she’s writing. She disowns literature, finds it appalling, a mistake. I found that oddly exciting. Yes, writing is a terrible mistake, now tell me more about your mother! 

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Laurence:  I guess I have used so many life experiences in my work (notably my love/ gratitude for the remoter parts of the country) that it was almost a given that I would want to explore the experience of having cancer which I found absolutely fascinating, as it is a place where you truly find science, art, and craft in a kind of harmony. It was a beautiful thing, in that respect: meditative almost. I liked the solitude of it; it reminded me very much of writing.

One thing I’d like to ask you about is the notion of passivity, as it relates to characters. I’ve noticed that readers sometimes express irritation with characters that don’t seem to take action. They remark that they’d like to give a character a kick in the pants. But I feel that passive, inward-looking characters are very true to life. It can take a long time to process information, experiences, and it’s a choice whether or not you act. Being slow and thoughtful is not a weakness in my eyes. I was thinking of this reading both your novels, Tina and Damien. The sense of simply ‘carrying on’ and not changing course showed up, the reluctance to change…and the force to change is sometimes external, forced on the characters. I prefer to understand my characters (as they are) rather than move them around as chess pieces on a board and I sensed something similar reading your novels too. 

Tina: I was challenged about this re: Sera in an early draft, and I did give her more to do, but I didn’t think her quietness was ‘passive’. I thought of it as a different kind of power. More meditative. Women need to rest when we can, and I liked giving this character who had been through so many horrors, the time and space to just be. This might have been influenced by my own experience with cancer, which became a kind of reckoning with all kinds of things. There was a lot of walking and doing as little as possible. Rest is resistance! (although, she has a toddler, so maybe not resting that much).

Kirsty: Going back to your point about interiority and lack of action, Laurence…Isn’t this one of the great pleasures of reading? In English language literature, at least? That glorious immersion in the inside of things…We start having access to that in Hamlet – thinking versus action – and take it from there. It’s a sort of education in imagination and thoughtfulness and developing depth of feeling. I love things not happening! But when they do – yes, that is interesting…But we need space around the explosion of ‘event’, is my view, I guess. We need the time that surrounds stuff happening on the page just as we need it in life. We need those seconds, minutes to pass…so we can think, feel, react for ourselves about it and not because the fiction has hurried us along.

 

Paula: Expanding on that idea of an ‘education in imagination’, what other writers and artists helped form your own (for each of you)? 

Tina: Coincidentally, I had reason to check my PhD thesis from 2013 for something today, and I came upon this passage again, from Margaret Mahy’s wonderful essay ‘A Dissolving Ghost’ (1991): ‘She wrote of a “marvellous code” – something present in

 

all our lives, so deep-set and omnipotent that it informs everything we do and cannot

be dismantled. “Broken into bits,” she suggests, “it starts to reassemble itself like the

Iron Man described by Ted Hughes, and creeps back into our lives patient but

Inexorable […] I am referring to story, something we encounter in childhood and live with all

our lives. Without the ability to tell or live prescribed stories we lose the ability to

make sense of our lives.”’ 

 

 

There is an essay in my forthcoming collection, This Compulsion in Us, that talks about the writers and artists who influenced me early on, including: Alice Walker, Jeanette Winterson, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Keri Hulme, Merata Mita, my grandmother, NZ filmmakers of the 1980s, my father for letting me watch them, and Masterpiece Theatre! It wasn’t an exhaustive list – add to that, fairy tales, creation stories, Robyn Kahukiwa, Patricia Grace, Robert Jahnke, Toni Morrison. After that the list just expands ever outwards. 

 

 

Damien: Circling back again to Laurence’s question about passive characters…I tried to work out what I thought in an essay on this very topic years ago. (It was republished in The Fuse Box, VUP 2017, next to one of Tina’s essays). I won’t rehash the argument but I do think passivity gets a bad rap. As Tina suggests, so-called passivity can be strategic and political. It can also, as Kirsty says, be another way of getting at interior lives. I connect it with the question of personal transformation and whether narratives are basically about characters who change. To escape that potentially coercive vocabulary (change your life!), I came up with something more modest, as in, I like to read about someone who has gone through something. A good novel makes us feel things more intensely. 

 

 

I read all the early Jean Rhys novels a while ago. You couldn’t say that her lead characters are transformed – but I was a bit. Their stuckness was the point. And then somehow the power of the language lifted and consoled – consoled the reader, not the characters. If change can’t be firmly or credibly located in a character, I reckon the book itself is the site of change. That said, I don’t think there’s automatically something more ‘serious’ or even interesting about a character who mooches around. Everything in writing is earned. Laurence: I’ve just started reading your novel. (Sorry, catching up!) There’s a wonderful small moment when the narrator, who is recovering from cancer, apologises to her partner for the fact that the café where he’s left his glasses is closed. Of course it’s not her fault. And she thinks how she’s become an apologiser since her diagnosis. Such a beautiful and surprising insight! Already this character feels like good company – someone alert to the changed world.

Laurence: I suppose I have been drawn to early 20th Century American novelists like Edith Wharton (House of Mirth) or Henry James (Washington Square) for the depth of insight into character and the pressures of society that squeezes and constricts. Stylistically, I was a big fan of Robert Walser, Marguerite Duras, Patrick Modiano etc –those immersive, sensory, European writers. 

 

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I remember that Kirsty’s Rain made a big impact on me when I was starting out because of its atmosphere and tone, and later, when I was living in Germany I had a copy of Damien’s which I must have read three or four times, almost studying it in terms of craft. Later still, meeting Tina because we did our PhDs together, was a very special experience, notable for the depth and care you showed towards the lives and stories you told through your novel. It made me think very deeply about who owns a story, who gets to tell it, and how important it is to acknowledge and respect where ideas come from. It had a big impact on me when I was writing my novel Scented, when I was learning about the Grand Māori Perfume. I became very aware of my lack of understanding.

Tina: Oh my goodness, The Grand Māori Perfume? I am also very aware of my lack of understanding about this! I feel, not for the first time, that I may be the least well-read person in this virtual room, and humbled by the care and attention to fiction that each of you show. It’s like fiction gives each of us the opportunity to look at something so closely and deeply, and to turn it on different angles, and see how the light is refracted, or what shadows fall. I feel so lucky to be able to do that and to be in the company of others who do it. I am playing a very long game of catch-up, but I did read Middlemarch for the first time in 2022 when I was just beginning the full draft of The Mires and was/am just in awe. Talk about a novel about someone/s who have ‘gone through something’, that ‘makes us feel things more intensely’! If I had time, I’d read it once a year. 

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Damien: Oh yes, Middlemarch! Like Laurence, I also love Edith Wharton, and Henry James was huge for me. Then William Faulkner. Then Thomas Bernhard, Gerald Murnane, Penelope Fitzgerald. More recently (last twenty years!), I’ve been drawn to a certain wonkiness of prose style in writers such as Christina Stead, Elizabeth Bowen, Doris Lessing, Norman Rush, Joy Williams, Dermot Healy, where the sentences don’t end in the expected places. I think I was trying to move on from smoothness to a kind of ugly or awkward — not in subject matter but in the prose. But truly the greatest reading experience (separate from writing influence) of my life has been The Story of the Stone, the 18th-century Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin. Five volumes in the incredible translation by David Hawkes and John Minford. Better than Proust. When I went to China a few years ago, someone helped me buy a second-hand copy in Mandarin. My retirement will be learning the language so I can read that book. The novel is also known as Dream of the Red Chamber. And that is my dream. (The novel is full of characters who are deluded.)

 

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Kirsty: It seems, a year after his death, I am still thinking about the powerful influence the work of Vincent O’Sullivan has been in my own education – academic, intellectual and imaginative. His scholarship and work on Mansfield lifted her, as a literary subject, right out of the bookshelf at home and the schoolrooms of my childhood in Wellington, and placed her bang-slap at the centre of literary Modernism in the English language. That was a game changer for me. That one could imagine a context of ‘home’ that was also ‘away’. 

Mansfield had taught me that idea first – but it was O’Sullivan’s work that gave the whole thing ballast and authority and…heft! All his own literary work is an expansion of that same idea. His poetry and novels and stories. He brings both hemispheres together, wraps pasts into presents and futures, and shows us that the imagination can…roam!

 

Paula: Where are you all thinking about roaming, in any sense, in the near future?

Laurence: The area that means the most to me, where I roam on a daily basis, is Signal Hill above Dunedin. The more time I spend on the hill, moving slowly and looking at things the greater my appreciation for nature. At the moment there is a fly agaric that is pushing its way through the rock-hard, compacted clay on the edge of the track. The ground is as hard as concrete and it is a marvel that it can actually break through. It just fills me with wonder every time I see it. 

At this time of year the lower bush is almost a cathedral of bird calls: bellbirds, tūī and fantails, and the sound enfolds  me as I walk through the trees. Down on the playing fields each morning a large flock of black-backed gulls gather and feed on the grass and then -it’s quite incredible -they all rise up together and circle once or twice while calling out loudly. The noise is intense – I don’t understand how they have the energy to fly and clack-call so loudly, both at the same time. They disappear over the stadium and once they land they’re quiet again. In the evening they fly past my house, up North Valley to roost up on Upper Junction, near Mt. Cargill. It’s magic.

 

 

Tina: I love that sense of repetition, and watching a place over time, and close attention that your relationship with Signal Hill reveals, Laurence. That kind of relationship with walking around Paraparaumu Beach was at the heart of The Mires. It’s the last place I thought I’d write about, because I like to get away from my immediate life and my immediate surrounds imaginatively when writing, but when I read Elif Shafak’s incredible evocation of Istanbul in 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in this Strange World, I wondered if I could write something anywhere near as vivid about my own neighbourhood, which is not considered the best place to live on the Kāpiti Coast. Why not? In Aotearoa we live in these incredibly beautiful places and a lot of the time, we take it for granted. In general, I don’t think we take time to really look properly, so I love what you’re describing, Laurence.

 

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If I’m lucky enough to go overseas for anything, I kind of use that as an opportunity to retrain my seeing. Wandering and wonder and curiosity are so key for a writer, so I spend as much of my time in other countries doing that if I can. Last year I went to Japan with the express purpose of seeking awe – Japan is such an extraordinary place for that for lots of reasons – the mixture of very ancient and very modern culture, the reverence for nature and for quietness. But when I come back, I’m always trying to bring my new eyes with me, to see my homeplaces the way someone else might see them if they’d never been here. In writing, my next project is short stories, which for me is kind of the literary equivalent of this wandering and wonder. It’s very freeing. I don’t have to know where I’m going or how I’m going to get there, although I do know that given the times we live in there may be a fair bit of dark humour and horror.

 

 

Damien: Paying attention is everything. The comedy of getting things wrong is also high on my list of pleasures from fiction. I’m going to talk about At the Grand Glacier Hotel again because that’s what I’m reading. The narrator’s yearning to know more and to connect more deeply with the natural world is such a strong thread and such a good source of the comedy and pathos of the novel. She makes these difficult, tentative forays outside the hotel and has thoughts: What is that bird singing to me? And: I won’t admit that I can’t remember its Māori name. Our longing for meaningfulness is so close to ridiculousness. 

But then, because Laurence’s narrator is recovering from the surgery on her leg and is disabled, she must also study again everything she thought she knew, such as how to get out of the bath. The scrambling of our usual coordinates is a great prompt for fear and uncertainty and hence story. If our old habits don’t work, what’s the new narrative? I think that’s how fiction can be sneakily political without leaving the bathroom. Our subject matter doesn’t need the obviously public to get at issues of significance. It drives me nuts when this writing is referred to as ‘quiet’. When Laurence’s narrator, dreading all kinds of humiliation, ends up crawling over the sides of the bath and then is pressed face down on the floor, this is not ‘quiet’.

I’m really not sure what’s next for me, fiction-wise. I’m finishing a set of songs which I’ll release later in the year. It’s really good to be involved in music since the words aren’t doing all the work! I can stop saying all these things and just let the guitar or the keyboards take over.

Kirsty: I love how everyone has that place of nourishment and return…And, as Tina says, these kinds of environments – places where we look and re-look and learn to look, and remember – are vital, and not only for writers. Everyone desires that special point of reference; it’s part of what makes us human. And these locations, contexts, geographies – they work upon our imagination to comfort us and bring replenishment and joy…A kind of homecoming. 

For me, the special places have a kind of overlay, a sort of doubling – they make of my here a there, and vice versa; they ease the past into the present and back again. Because I no longer live in New Zealand, New Zealand remains a powerfully present landscape to me. There’s not a day goes by when I’m in London or the Highlands of Scotland where I also live and am not flooded with that sense of homecoming; the feeling that really, I am in New Zealand and that the world of my childhood has never left me, that it’s all around. So I’m not in Sutherland or West London, at all, then, but that the other beloved place is the only here and now. And the New Zealand of my infinite return and replenishment is Wellington and the Wairarapa, each overlaying my experience of cities and the countryside respectively. 

So, say, I look up from my desk in Sutherland and see a landscape of low hills and paddocks, a big sky and a view that stretches on into a green faded by the sun and wind – and I am straight back to my past: long holidays with my grandmother, and aunt and cousins on their farm. Or I’m walking past a cafe somewhere, and there: I’m really in Wellington. Doesn’t matter where I actually am; as far as I’m concerned I’m in Thorndon, for sure. I remember once when I’d asked Bill Manhire to give a reading to some of my students at Dundee, and afterwards, we were walking around that city and I said to him, ‘See? Doesn’t Dundee make you think of Wellington too? The same layout, combination of hills and water? The same kind of streets? Don’t you think it’s exactly the same feel and mood?’ Bill gave me a funny look and said: ‘I think you’ve been here a long time, Kirsty …’ But truly, this stuff for me is real. It’s the stuff of my imagination and my experience, both, and it’s powerful and exciting and real.………………………Alfredton in the North Wairarapa. Image supplied by Kirsty Gunn.

 

The 2025 Ockhams Finalists

Explore the finalists for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in these four digital samplers, with extracts from all sixteen shortlisted books.

Over the next month we’re releasing a new digital sampler every week, each dedicated to a different awards genre: Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Poetry and Illustrated Non-Fiction.

You can view read-only versions at Issuu, the New Zealand Book Awards Trust website, or click on the covers below to download samplers and read at your leisure. Then seek out the complete books in bookshops and libraries countrywide.

 

….Jann Medlicott Acorn…………………………………..……….. BookHub Award for
……..Prize for Fiction………………………………………………..Illustrated Non-Fiction

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…Mary and Peter Biggs……………………………………………….General Non-Fiction
….Award for Poetry……………………………………………………………Award

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‘I became obsessed’

ANZL writers on what they’ve been reading in 2024 – new books, classics, books for research, books for pleasure, books from Aotearoa NZ or around the world.

 

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Tina Shaw  

Tina’s recent book A House Built on Sand (Text Publishing, 2024) was the winner of the 2023 Michael Gifkins Prize.
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In my Book Discussion Scheme book group, 2024 accidentally turned into the year of the memoir. The one I liked best was Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour. It contained many elements that were great to discuss, such as a guy’s obsession with his absent, eccentric father; becoming a father oneself; and the journey of taking care of a rescue magpie named Benzene. It is a story about an ‘interspecies family set-up’ that weaves human and magpie beings into a larger metaphor to do with real life.
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In my other book group, we take turns to choose a book each month to read. One book I chose was Carl Nixon’s The Waters (and why wasn’t this novel shortlisted for the Ockhams?), about the Waters family – practical, athletic Mark; beautiful Davey; and the baby of the family, Samantha – who have had to face more than their fair share of challenges. Described as ‘a novel in 21 stories’, Carl riffs on family dynamics with a deft touch.

 

 

Another book I introduced to the group was The Deck by Fiona Farrell (honestly, why wasn’t this amazing novel not even longlisted for the Ockhams?). A group hunker down at a modern coastal retreat and share stories. There are images from this novel that have stayed with me: the girl lying under a plum tree who connects with a young deer. The mysterious yacht anchored in the bay below the house.

Judging the YA category of the Storylines Notable Book Awards, I was impressed with Migration by Steph Matuku, a story about friendship, featuring a school for training fighters, strategic thinkers and military personnel.

 

           
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Other reading … To inform the novel I’m currently writing, I’ve been reading Resistance by Australian author Jacinta Halloran. I love the conversations that take place in this novel and how the characters are defined by what they say – or don’t say. It’s about a family therapist who is talking to a family who took off into the outback. It’s subtle, empathetic, political.

Not Australian, but somehow connected in my mind to Resistance are the works of Rachel Cusk (author of the Outline trilogy). This year, Parade was released. It isn’t my favourite Cusk work, but it’s still very interesting. As the Guardian put it (better than I could): ‘it pursues and deepens her lifelong interest in the relationship between art and life in a narrative sequence that also explores fraught alliances between men and women, the nature of gender and the complications involved in losing a parent.’

I kept thinking: This would never have been published in New Zealand!

There have been random discoveries: Western Lane by Chatna Maroo, a coming-of-age story about girls playing competitive squash, and fathers; and Boulder by Eva Baltasar (translated by Julia Sanches) about a woman nicknamed ‘Boulder’ by her lover. Working as a cook on merchant ships, she becomes obsessively connected with a Swedish woman, giving up freedom to take up life on land, like ordinary folk. What is so compelling about this short novel is its strong and poetic language, described as ‘prose as brittle and beautiful as an ancient saga’.

 

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My latest find is All Fours by Miranda July. OMG. I have to take this one to my book group: it’ll shake them up! Put in simple terms, a 45-year-old artist and perimenopausal woman sets off on a road trip but ends up only 30 minutes from home at a nondescript motel where she discovers a beautiful boy who comes to obsess her and remakes her motel room into five-star luxury. Trying to deal with her obsession, she has a kind of sexual awakening. It’s a story about ageing and one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Totally engrossing; a crazy ride.
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To end on a non-fiction note (a genre I don’t read much, unless it’s for research): The Crewe Murders: Inside New Zealand’s most infamous cold case by James Hollings and Kirsty Johnstone. Fascinating stuff.
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Brannavan Gnanalingam

Brannavan’s latest work The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat (Lawrence & Gibson, 2024) is available now.
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I am very structured with my reading, and essentially have three categories of reading. The first, is when I’m reading for pleasure, and read whatever I feel like. For me, this is the period when I’m between books, a kind of ‘fallow ground’ period. The second period, is when I’m reading around the idea of the book I’m planning to work on, when I’m getting myself ready to write and am building the clear sense of what the book is about e.g. if I’m writing a horror novel, like Slow Down, You’re Here, I’m reading a lot of horror. The third is when I read to get around problems I might be having when I’m writing, and I read to work things out.

This year was dominated for me by the writing of The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat, the idea of which, came to me at the start of the year. The book is a parody of the political bio, a form that forced me to think how ‘events’ could be structured in my book, and how I’d need to downplay momentum and focus more on episodic storytelling. I read memoirs / autobiographies of politicians from all sides of the spectrum, including Rodney Hide (My Year of Living Dangerously), Helen Clark (Helen Clark: Inside Stories by Claudia Pond Eyley and Dan Salmon), Jim Bolger (Fridays with Jim by David Cohen), and John Tamihere (Black and White). I noticed the caginess of most political bios, as politicians sought to protect their legacies, or at least not burn too many bridges. I found Simon Bridges’ National Identity the most interesting, as he was more thoughtful than most, and honest in his own failings but also some of the challenges he encountered.

 

 

 

I also read books relevant for the themes, such as Byron C Clark’s Fear, around the rise of the online far right in Aotearoa, along with a few famous novels about the interwar period and the immediately aftermath of the war including The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Djiboutian writer Abdourahman A Waberi’s Harvest of Skulls (about Rwanda), All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, Irmgard Keun’s After Midnight (a magnificent novel about the rise of 1930s fascism, that is both light and hilarious, while also deeply chilling in the way ordinary people can collude with fascism and scapegoating) and The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (I was less enamoured by this one, although I suspect that that was due to the awkwardness around Grass’ own complicity with the Nazi regime).

 

 

This was unusual writing period for me, in that Kartik’s voice came out fairly clear and sustained. It meant I didn’t read all that much when I was working at quite a feverish pace. Accordingly, it also meant I didn’t have to read around any problems. One book that did stand out though was reading Huo Yan’s Dry Milk, which is a rare novel about Asian immigrants in which the protagonist is thoroughly dislikeable. Dry Milk taught me not to be worried about maintaining my tone / steely gaze on the utter failings of my protagonist (not that I needed much encouragement given the political figures who inspired my book), and one of the joys this year, has been discovering how much of an impact Dry Milk has had among Asian writers in both Aotearoa and Australia. It’s like a secret club.

 

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I have enjoyed being able to read for pleasure though, since finishing my book. Local highlights include Saraid de Silva’s AMMA, which along with romesh dissanayake’s When I open the shop (which I had read as romesh’s MA supervisor) showcased two assured and brilliant Sri Lankan writers in this country, and I hope more people read their work. Tusiata Avia’s Big Fat Brown Bitch is Avia at both her most vulnerable and scabrous best, and Avia’s continued targeting by certain politicians is an ongoing scandal. Simone Kaho’s beautiful Heal! looks at the messiness of trauma while also emphasising defiance and survival and subversion in the aftermath. Stacey Teague’s Plastic pulls together the various strands of identity and how fraught making peace with it all can be. Talia Marshall’s Whaea Blue is one of the most ruthless self-eviscerations I’ve ever read, and her sentences force the reader to shake their complacency in ways few writers bother to do. JP Pomare’s Seventeen Years Later showcases Pomare’s complete mastery of narrative, while adding a political resonance to his excellent and underrated body of work. Jared Davidson’s Blood and Dirt tells the histories of how much of Aotearoa’s infrastructure (streets, ports, buildings) have been built by slave labour / prisoner labour, which we also managed to export to Samoa, Niue, and the Cook Islands – like the best histories, it forces you to see your country in a completely different light. Maddie Ballard’s Bound is a lovely and assured debut collection of essays, in which Ballard incorporates her love of sewing into examining ideas of identity, belonging and holding space for yourself in the world.

 

        

 

Global highlights include Michael Winkler’s brilliantly chaotic Grimmish, Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger, Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani’s short stories (including in the collection Men in the Sun), David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives (the current political environment doesn’t feel all that removed from the horrors of the religious right / Republican response in the ’80s to AIDS, as brutally depicted by Wojnarowicz’s ruthless memoir).
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I have a very large TBR pile, and I look forward to cracking into a bunch of the summer, including Tina Makereti’s The Mires, Lee Murray’s Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud, Cher Tan’s Peripathetic, David Coventry’s Performance, and Olive Nuttall’s Kitten.
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Rachael King

Rachael’s latest work The Grimmelings (Allen & Unwin, 2024) is available now.
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Quite a few people I’ve talked to lately have had a hard time reading this year. Keeping on top of the news cycle fractures my brain and makes it hard to concentrate on either reading or writing, so, like many, I haven’t read all the books I intended to, and I have veered away from ‘difficult’ books to more comforting reads. I also had a book published this year, which is a distraction in itself, and I have read more children’s books than adults’ because that is my writing community now, and I want to support the eco-system. Middlegrade books are having a moment in Aotearoa, with some strong and beautifully crafted books on offer for tweens and under (and over – these books are for everyone). There were ten novels on the recent Storylines Notable Books list, with only two on the Young Adult section. Two! Why this is warrants further investigation.

 

 

 

My notable mentions in children’s books are Claire Mabey’s The Raven’s Eye Runaways, a gorgeous debut from a beautiful writer; Jane Arthur’s poignant and poetic Brown Bird; another intelligent cli-fi from Bren MacDibble, The Apprentice Witnesser; Stacy Gregg’s Margaret Mahy Award winner, Nine Girls, which combines a quirky family story with a history lesson; and Tania Roxborogh’s exciting and topical Charlie Tangaroa and the God of War, the second in a planned trilogy. All these books would make excellent Christmas presents for young people in your life (and then steal them and read on a beach yourself).

 

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I became obsessed with the British author Catherine Storr when I reread the frankly terrifying 1958 children’s novel Marianne Dreams in preparation for my Backlisted debut (if you haven’t found the best books podcast go and get it now). I also read Marianne Dreams’ lesser-known sequel Marianne & Mark, and fell in love with Thursday, a young adult novel that sets the Tam Lin myth in 1970 suburban London, and I have hunted down many more of her books to read next year.

 

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A Backlisted recommendation led me to my favourite novel of the year, Joan Barfoot’s Gaining Ground (published by The Women’s Press in 1980), which is extremely hard to get, but good old Christchurch City Libraries have a well-worn copy to borrow. It made me want to cut off all my hair and move to an isolated cottage somewhere.

Also memorable was a newer book – I hesitate to call it a novel – Ben Tuffnell’s The North Shore, an eerie and singular work that starts out as folk horror, but transforms into a series of essays on art and nature and back again. One to read slowly and thoughtfully.

 

 

 

Two non-fiction books that I loved were Alan Garner’s sublime Powsels and Thrums, essays and reflections on creativity and his life, and Sam Leith’s brilliant The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, which is accessible, humorous and fascinating. And big. I’m reviewing it for the Listener so I’ll leave it at that for now.

 

 

 

Finally, my list is haunted by the books I bought but didn’t read, so this summer I’m looking forward to Tina Makereti’s The Mires, Louise Wallace’s Ash, Mary-Anne Scott’s The Mess of Our Lives, and Gareth and Louise Ward’s The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone.

 

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Vanda Symon

Vanda’s latest work Prey (Orenda Books, 2024) is available now.
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One of the fun reading challenges I gave myself this year was to read from around the world. I realised I was tending to read books from the English speaking world, so decided to expand my horizons and seek out translated books to read. It was such a great challenge that I am going to continue with it in 2025. My best pick of these was a bit of a cheat because French writer Fred Vargas was already a favourite author. I adore her Inspector Adamsberg books, and This Poison Will Remain did not disappoint. This case weaves in death by spider venom, dark local intrigue from the past, and the absolutely fascinating history of the recluses.

 

 

I read a lot of non-fiction and memoir and one of my favourites this year was Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie. Rushdie was grievously injured in 2022 while about to deliver a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe when he was attacked by a man wielding a knife. This memoir is stunning and gives such insight into his immense journey to recovery, and the power of love. It was a moving and an uplifting read.

 

 

I always have New Zealand fiction and non-fiction on the go and the book that was a surprise hit for me was the memoir The Bookseller at the End of the World by Ruth Shaw. What an amazing life she has lead, with adventure and heart-break. It made my life feel so tame! I will have to go visit her tiny bookshops in Manapouri now.

 

 

My favourite book of the year though was The Trials of Marjorie Crowe by C.S.Robertson. This novel beautifully ties together the modern day tendency to accuse and try by social media, and the terrible historic legacy of burning women who were different, of burning the witch. The titular character is odd, and complex and has no choice but to try and solve the murders she is accused of before they try to burn the witch.

 

 

 

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Paula Morris

Paula’s new novel Yellow Palace is forthcoming in 2025.
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One of my projects this year is editing the letters Robin Hyde sent back from Asia and Britain in 1938 and 1939, the last two years of her life. I’ve been reading a lot directly related to China and the Sino-Japanese War – James Bertram, Agnes Smedley, Edgar Snow. A recent book by Chris Elder, Interesting Times: Some New Zealanders in Republican China, was useful preparation for a research trip to China in November. I had foot surgery in August, so ended up – like Hyde – relying on a walking stick there, limping around Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Xuzhou, Qingdao and Shanghai.
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As usual, I was also led down various garden paths by other books, including the glorious Bosshard in China: Documenting Social Change in the 1930s and the brief but bizarre The China Letter by Dr George Hill Hodel, who worked in a war-devastated Wuhan (Hankow) in 1946. Until the book arrived from the US, looking as though it was produced in someone’s garage, I didn’t realise that Hodel is more famous as an (alleged) serial killer in Los Angeles.
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To get a stronger sense of Shanghai in the 30s I read the charming Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels by Isabel Sun Chao and her daughter Claire Chao, and of course became obsessed with the brilliance and style of Eileen Chang. The stories and novellas Love in a Fallen City are set in Hong Kong and Shanghai, ranging from the end of Imperial China through the Republican era to the fall of Hong Kong to the Japanese. A small bilingual book called Eileen Chang’s Shanghai by Chun Zi, Wang Zhendong and Feng Hong was an indispensable guide to the city where she was born – in 1920 – and became first a literary sensation, then a pariah.

For the novel I’m finishing work on, I read Africa is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent by Dipo Faloyin, a book that is sharp, funny, informative and depressing, and An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi. (I also saw the fantastic documentary Dahomey, directed by Mati Diop, in this year’s International Film Festival.) Although I have never been interested in anything even vaguely scientific, I learned a lot from Nicolas Niarchos in essays like ‘The Dark Side of Congo’s Cobalt Rush’ in the New Yorker and ‘In Congo’s Cobalt Mines’ in the New York Review of Books.

Also for the novel I dived one again into the insanity that was the relationship between Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka. I keep taking Oskar Kokoschka: A Life by Frank Whitford out of Auckland Public Library to read about the life-size doll OK commissioned after Alma left him. He cavorted with it in public even though it was covered in a feathery swanskin and didn’t look much like Alma at all. Finally, at a party sometime in the 1920s, he cut off its head.
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My novel is not about Kokoschka or Alma Mahler, or about mining in DRC, but these are things I needed to read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fleur Adcock: 1934 – 2024

From Sarah Quigley:

The poet Fleur Adcock, who died in October at the age of ninety, leaves a remarkable body of work that spans more than five decades. Delicate yet dark, tender yet wry, laidback and conversational yet sharply observational: the balancing of opposites in her poetry symbolises all she was as an artist. Fleur’s multilayered poems won her high acclaim not only in her birth country New Zealand but also in England, where she lived for most of her adult life. She was noted for her work translating medieval Latin and contemporary Romanian poetry, and edited several significant works, including The Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (1982) and, with Jacqueline Simms, The Oxford Book of Creatures (1995).

Fleur was born in 1934 in Papakura to English parents: Cyril Adcock, a teacher, and Irene (nee Robinson), a music teacher and writer. When Fleur was five and her sister Marilyn (later Marilyn Duckworth, the acclaimed novelist) was four, the family relocated to London so Cyril could study at Birkbeck College. The outbreak of war meant that Fleur and Marilyn were evacuated to the countryside and moved multiple times, which may account for the unsentimental resilience that was ever-present in Fleur’s personality and her writing.

After moving back to New Zealand and studying classics at Wellington Girls’ College and Victoria University of Wellington, at the age of eighteen Fleur married the poet Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, who was also educated in classics and was a member of the informal ‘Wellington Group’, along with James K. Baxter, Peter Bland and others. Fleur and Alistair had two sons, Gregory and Andrew, before divorcing in 1958. Four years later, Fleur married the already well-known comedic writer Barry Crump. The marriage lasted only five months, whereupon Fleur left for England. It seems to have been a homecoming of sorts, as she remained there for the rest of her life, although visiting New Zealand regularly. The dislocations of emigration – in both directions – permeate many of her poems: there is often a deep unease underlying seemingly calm domestic settings, and an intense examination of the relationship between personal identity and place. Fleur’s first collection of poetry, The Eye of the Hurricane (1964), was mostly written before she left for London, but many of its poems have no specific setting, suggesting an ambivalence towards the landscapes of New Zealand.

Often in her poetry Fleur drew on memories of her English childhood, recreating vivid scenes in her inimitable, intimate voice:

 

And what was the happiest day I remember?

It was when we went to the Mill Stream –

my sister and I and the Morris kids.

We wore our bathing-suits under our dresses

(subterfuge), crossed the live railway lines

(forbidden), and tramped through bluebell woods.

 

Her second collection, Tigers, was published by Oxford University Press in 1967 and marked the start of an illustrious and prolific writing career that resulted in more than twenty books. Fleur won numerous awards, including the 1977/78 Arts Council creative writing fellowship in Ambleside in the Lake District (a landscape she fell in love with). She also worked as a poetry commentor for the BBC. In 1979, she resigned from her job as a librarian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, took up the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship at the Universities of Newcastle upon Tyne and Durham – followed by a long line of distinguished writers including Jo Shapcott, Barry Unsworth, and Jackie Kay – and began focusing fulltime on her writing. Other prestigious awards followed, including an OBE (1996), a Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry (2006), and the Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature (2008).

It can be difficult for New Zealand-born writers living away to avoid the tag of ‘writer in exile’, but Adcock always transcended national pigeonholing. Like Katherine Mansfield, she developed both an intense attachment to, and a sharp-eyed detachment from, the country of her birth. One gets the sense that it took Fleur many years to know how to – or to want to – tackle that topic. She claimed that she could ‘never write’ when she was in New Zealand, but by 2014, she was ready to base an entire collection around her New Zealand ancestry. The Land Ballot is a poetic sequence recounting the story of her grandparents, immigrants from Manchester, who won a hundred and fifty acres of ‘unbroached bush’ at Te Rauamoa. In a compelling mix of fact – ‘things turn folkloric if you wait too long’ – and conjecture, Fleur recreated one of the most fascinating and strange periods of colonial history: small isolated communities establishing determined pockets of Europeanness in an alien environment. The historic could equally be read as the personal – a parallel to the way she and her New Zealand contemporaries felt in the 1950s and ’60s, looking towards Europe for subject matter and form, all the while searching for ways to interpret where they were actually living.

Just as themes of cultural identity and displacement recur throughout Fleur’s oeuvre, so do the preoccupations central to ‘humanness’: love, sex, ambition, illness, cruelty, kindness. Who can forget the lines from ‘For a Five-Year-Old’, in which the poet helps her son rescue a snail:

 

… your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

 

This is pure Adcock: unsentimentality yoked with deep emotion; the seemingly casual tone countered by finely wrought rhyme and form – and the searingly understated denouement, which has the finality and force of a blow or a kiss. This is surely what Carol Ann Duffy referred to when she described Fleur’s talent as being like ‘a razor blade in a peach’.

Fleur’s friend C. K. Stead, in his exquisite poem ‘An Horatian ode to Fleur Adcock at eighty’, described her as ‘that princess of quiet fire / from a southern city’, who collected lovers – ‘too many to remember’ – and then turned her back on it all in favour of ‘her family’s fables / and deftest celebrations / of the life of things / with feelers and wings’. It was, in fact, in her eightieth year that I visited Fleur in her North London house, and I witnessed these celebrations of nature and domestic life firsthand. She welcomed me into her characterful old house, where we drank tea in the kitchen and chatted about New Zealand poetry, mutual acquaintances, writing – and not writing. In the decade from 2000 to 2010 Fleur had published nothing, but now she was writing again at full strength, with no diminishment in her energy, empathy, and wit.

Later in the afternoon, we wandered in the nearby woods. Fleur stopped frequently, stooping to examine minute plants half submerged in leaves, or gazing through the latticework of branches to point out cloud formations that towered and then toppled. For someone like me who’s always in a hurry, the crisp sunny afternoon felt miraculously sealed off from the bustle of ordinary life. Fleur had the ability to live completely in the moment. Yet far from losing herself in it, she actively engaged with it; absorbed it (nothing escaped her curious interest, from the pattern on a bone-china teacup to the blazing grandeur of an English oak); and then, in a kind of poetic alchemy, transformed it with a sleight-of-hand casualness that never eschewed elegance.

Fleur continued to write into her eighties. In 2019, she marked her eighty-fifth birthday with the publication of her substantial Collected Poems: she had become ‘embarrassingly prolific’, as she quipped in an interview with RNZ’s Kim Hill. On 10 February 2024, on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday, Te Herenga Waka University Press simultaneously with Bloodaxe Books in the UK published an expanded version that included twenty new poems. The poised, often ironic tone is as present as ever in the new work, as is Fleur’s deep, empathetic insight into the plight and privilege of being alive.

It’s hard to sum up a writer whose reputation is as large, whose oeuvre is as substantial, and whose creative talent is as magical as Fleur Adcock’s. Perhaps we need only look at her name for a summary of her talent, her last name bringing to mind the qualities of an adze: the hard integrity of stone, a clearcut vision slicing through layers of artifice to reach the heart of the matter. And then her first name: the delicacy of a flower, the lightness of touch that seems so natural one can only wonder: How did she do that? Now that she’s gone, we’re still entranced, still in awe, still wondering.

Fleur is survived by her sons Gregory and Andrew; six grandchildren, Oliver, Lilian, Julia, Ella, Cait and Rosa; seven great-grandchildren, Charlie, Ash, Seth, Alexandra, Jean, Ella and Mira Fleur; and her sister Marilyn.

Fleur Adcock, poet, born 10 February 1934; died 10 October 2024

 

 

Read Emma Neale‘s interview with Fleur Adcock here.

From the edge of the sky

Number 35 Arapito Road, Titirangi, West Auckland is now a listed Category 1 Historic Place. The Going West Trust plan to restore the house and open it as a writers’ residency. But if you asked any writer under the age of 40 why this is, I doubt if any would come up with the right answer. This presents an object lesson in why some dead authors are remembered and others not only forgotten but consciously blanked.

The modest, undistinguished property below the road was the home of Maurice Shadbolt from 1964 to 2000. During the second half of the 20th century, Shadbolt was a constant, ubiquitous presence in our literary world. He published 15 novels and short story collections, ten non-fiction books, a seminal play. He won the Wattie Book of the Year award twice, was published regularly in the US and UK and his work was heavily translated. He even had a story published in the New Yorker before Janet Frame. So why have Shadbolt’s work and opinions been studiously ignored since his death 20 years ago?

In the context of the current debate and furore surrounding the Treaty Principles bill and Māori-Pākehā relations, it might be useful to look at what he wrote that is relevant, at least in order to help understand where we once were and what may be of remaining value in understanding who we are now.

Born in 1932, Shadbolt grew up in Te Kuiti in relatively poor circumstances during the Depression and war decades. Many school mates and neighbours were Māori, and he attended events at Te Kooti’s meeting house. This early experience, of communities and landscapes, strongly influenced his writing throughout his life. The short story that the New Yorker chose to publish from his first collection The New Zealanders in 1959 was ‘The Strangers’ which revealed the conflicting attitude towards life and work between a Pākehā farmer and his Māori employee. ‘There were the two of them, neither understanding the other, and I stood between, only knowing that of all the strange and terrible things in life the strangest and most terrible was that of two people not understanding each other.’ The ‘I’ of the young boy between was Shadbolt the author who repeatedly wrote between the two worlds in the belief they could and should come together, even that they were together.

 

 

The activating incident of his first novel, Among the Cinders (1965), is the death of Sam Waikai from a fall when his Pākehā mate young Nick startles him on finding ancient bones in a cave. Shadbolt later wrote that he and his Te Kuiti school mates explored caves that were everywhere in the Waitomo landscape. ‘Some were rumoured to be ancient burial places heaped with old Maori bones.’ His childhood was ‘never short on rumour, terror, and death in sorry form.’ He avoided some caves after learning of the ‘violent consequence of violating tapu … Your hair went white overnight; your teeth fell out; you went mad and were dead in a week.’ A sense of superstition and the power of the supernatural were enduring.

Although Māori characters continued to be included in much of Shadbolt’s fiction, they did not become central until his major trilogy of novels located in the New Zealand Wars, beginning with Season of the Jew in 1986. It told the story of Te Kooti’s ‘rebel’ Poverty Bay campaigns of the late 1860s, following his escape with Ringatu followers from Chatham Island banishment, and concluding with the scandalous execution of Hamiora Pere for treason, pour encourager les autres. Shadbolt’s sympathy with Māori and their charismatic leaders during the wars was original for a Pākehā novelist, partly stimulated by the awakening to Māori perspectives of the period expressed in contemporary historical narratives by historians like James Belich. Season of the Jew’s best-selling importance was marked by Shadbolt gaining his second Wattie Award in 1987.

 

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In his trilogy, Shadbolt used Pākehā soldiers for his entry into the warrior world of the Māori. But where George Fairweather in Season of the Jew was fictional, Kimball Bent of Monday’s Warriors (1990) was a real, deserting soldier who, as a captive, assisted Titokowaru in his campaigns against Pākehā settlers in south Taranaki. In Monday’s Warriors, and the other novels of the trilogy, Shadbolt based his stories on the historical record and acknowledged the research of Belich and the value of ‘walking the ground’ of battle sites with military historian Christopher Pugsley. The sense of authenticity is strongest in Monday’s Warriors, and weakest in the third novel The House of Strife (1993), which was set in the 1840s wars in the north.

Season of the Jew ends with an imagined late-life reconciliation between Te Kooti and his Pākehā adversary, soldier-painter George Fairweather, a figurative gesture of mutual forgiveness between enemies, between cultures, that Shadbolt idealised. Despite this, and his long friendships with Māori creatives like artist Selwyn Muru and master carver Pine Taiapa – whom he claimed as a key inspiration in his own artistic development – Shadbolt became disenchanted with the rise of Māori activism and the trends towards separatism. The beliefs and structures that had underpinned most of Shadbolt’s work, and especially the Wars Trilogy, seemed under threat from a once-homogenous society that was steadily factionalising with the growth of what became known as ‘identity politics’.

His anger erupted in a damning review of the 1991 collection of contributed essays, edited by Michael King, Pakeha: The Quest for Identity in New Zealand. Shadbolt wrote that the book was for the ‘chattering class’ in the ‘Peter Pan land of the politically correct: all things Maori good, all things European bad. No one questions the concept of “Maori culture” or suggests that it may be a much-thinned, post-Christian version of the real thing, about as authentic as the Scottish kilt.’ He rejected the term Pākehā as of no use in an increasingly multi-cultural country and that the use of the word ‘argues that white New Zealanders exist only in relation to Maori.’ His review, in fact, focussed on only one of the essays in the book but it struck a nerve, generating much correspondence in the columns of the New Zealand Herald, both for and against.

Shadbolt’s strong feelings arose not only from his friendships with and support of Māori from childhood, but also from his own sense of belonging, of his family being rooted in the land. His criticism had been reinforced by his concurrent exploration of Shadbolt family origins in New Zealand, beginning in 1859, which resulted in his much-reprinted memoir One of Ben’s (1993). In the 1991 debate, he declared he was no Pākehā. ‘I’m a New Zealander thank you, a pale-skinned Polynesian. New Zealanders are my iwi, Titirangi is my turangawaewae.’

 

 

Shadbolt’s declared identity went back almost 30 years to his text for that eulogy to New Zealand, Gift of the Sea, powerfully illustrated by Brian Brake’s photographs. It was a celebration of what the country had achieved by the early 1960s, its pioneering heroes, its Māori heritage, its future as a country of mixed-race Polynesians. It sold close on 100,000 copies, reassuring the dominant culture that all was well. Shadbolt projected this image overseas with his books and international magazine articles; more than any other writer of his time, he took New Zealand to the world. His belief in the image of New Zealand he promoted resulted in what was probably his best novel, The Lovelock Version (1980). It was a complete mythical reimagining of New Zealand history that historian W.H. Oliver described as a ‘comic epic with serious social purpose.’ It was a ‘lament for the loss of a better possibility than the option in fact chosen.’

How much of Shadbolt’s sense of being a New Zealander survives now, especially following the political and cultural changes pushing towards Māori sovereignty since his death 20 years ago? Is his vision a wreck on a forgotten shore? When I returned to New Zealand in 2014 after a research trip to the UK, a customs officer at Auckland airport, as he was going through my hand luggage, asked me what I did for a living. ‘I’m a writer,’ I said, expecting a quizzical look that suggested, ‘Tell me another one.’ But he asked, ‘So what are you writing?’  After I said that I was researching for a biography of Maurice Shadbolt, I waited for a frown and a shake of the head.

Instead he said, ‘Well I think One of Ben’s is the best New Zealand book ever written.’ I nodded and smiled and said, ‘Oh, right,’ although I did not agree. I was taken aback but his response seemed to indicate the lingering influence of Shadbolt’s novels and non-fiction books, so many of them best-sellers, on the psyche of Pākehā New Zealanders, and of how they thought about themselves and their country. Shadbolt thought of himself as much tangata whenua as Māori. Perhaps many Pākehā believe the same.

 

 

Shadbolt’s insistence on himself as tangata whenua may be one reason why his work has been largely ignored since his death. Perhaps the rise of identity politics around ethnicity and gender mean that younger New Zealanders are not interested in 20th century images of New Zealand history and identity from a dead white male, especially one with a reputation as a notorious philanderer. This further complicated his legacy during the first years of the #MeToo movement. The first volume of my biography of Shadbolt, Life As a Novel, was published in 2018 to excellent reviews, but I was not invited to take part in any literary festival (save in my home town), even to Going West.

This raises the chronic, thorny question of how much knowledge of authors’ private lives should influence a reader’s approach to their work. In recent times, there has been a tendency to reframe appreciation of an author’s work through the lens of extra-literary judgments. Life and work are intertwined but Shadbolt was essentially a storyteller, and his writing is best approached without moral complication. Perhaps when 35 Arapito Road, with its bush studio, finally becomes the location for an inspiring writers’ residency, Maurice Shadbolt’s stories and myths, created from ‘the edge of the sky’, will be better understood and appreciated.

 

 

Philip Temple is the author of the two-volume Life as Novel: a biography of Maurice Shadbolt.

 

 

 

 

 

The Best of Vincent O’Sullivan

Vincent O’Sullivan’s last book, the poetry collection Still Is, was published in June. The poems, writes James Norcliffe, ‘are marked with O’Sullivan’s indelible signature: they are wry, witty, with conversationalist titles and tone belied by the layered irony and all but subterranean passion.’ We asked ten other New Zealand writers to choose their favourite book by O’Sullivan – a difficult task, given his prowess in poetry, fiction and nonfiction.

 

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Owen Marshall

Vincent was a true polymath with talents spread over so many creative fields, yet each work rich in depth and understanding.  Like so many others I was fortunate to have his friendship and support.  The book of his I choose to mention here is the biography of John Mulgan Long Journey To The Border (Penguin Books, 2003). It displays Vincent’s rigorous scholarship, his psychological insight, his command of language and especially his empathy and support for others on the journey of life. Mulgan was a highly intelligent and accomplished man, yet conflicted in subtle ways.  How well Vincent is able to understand and explain him. I re-read the biography recently and was comforted to hear Vincent’s voice again. He is never obtrusive in his works, but always discernible, and that compounds their worth.

 

 

Kirsty Gunn

Vincent’s novel Let the River Stand (Penguin Books, 1993) is on my list of favourite novels ever. I love it for its dense sense of atmosphere and landscape, as though the fiction has simply followed the contours of the place of its setting. From the moment it was published and I read it, I could feel the way this book was made slide straight into my soul.

 

 

Elizabeth Smither

My favourite has to be Us, Then (Victoria University Press, 2013) which won the Montana Book Award for Poetry in 2014. Favourite because I had the pleasure of presenting it to Vincent at the awards ceremony. I can still feel the warmth of his handshake and his softly murmured ‘Thank you’ which I repeated back to him as if we were playing ping pong. There were brilliant entries that year but when I reached the end of Us, Then I knew that Vincent could go to places that others couldn’t. He had techniques up his sleeve, a flexibility that extended itself with each new poem. I can’t say it better than Michael Hulse: Vincent had ‘a tireless affectionate scrutiny’ that never failed.

 

 

Stephanie Johnson

Vincent never ceased to surprise and break new ground. His very last book of short stories, Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques and Other Stories (Te Herenga Waka University Press) was published in 2022. It is a delight: measured, subtle, cerebral, mature and erudite. Control of language and elucidation of the most subtle human emotion and impulse is second to none. The volume consists of six long short stories, a now neglected form, and concludes with the startling novella ‘Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques’. From beginning to finish, the master is at work. Vale, Vincent. You are missed.

 

 

Chris Else

The book that best represents Vince for me is his last collection of fiction, Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques and Other Stories (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), the novella that gives the book its title, in particular. This splendid riff on the tale of Frankenstein is at once a fond pastiche, a moving love story and a subtly subversive comment on modern cultural debates, all done with the skill of a master craftsman still, at 84, at the height of his powers. The scholarship, the wit and the great humanity of the man are there for all to see.

 

Majella Cullinane

For a year or so before Vincent published Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques, I used to meet him at Otago Museum cafe for lunch and we’d talk about what we were working on. At one such lunch, I discovered our mutual love for Shelley’s Frankenstein, and also that we both thought the book’s ending was pretty ambiguous. When he told me his idea for a story where the monster turns up in Fiordland I thought it was brilliant. The style of the novella’s language, the depiction of the landscape, and the deep empathy Vincent has for Jean-Jacques, was, in my opinion, the perfect sequel to the classic. He not only expands on the original but makes it his own, and uniquely kiwi.
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Cilla McQueen

Apart from his poetry books, worlds in themselves in which I tread with awe, my favourite book of Vincent’s is The Dark Is Light Enough (Penguin Books, 2020), his biographical portrait of Ralph Hotere.

Both artists of the highest calibre, each spoke his natural chosen language of paint or words. They approached their work with humanity and humility. It seems to me that there was a similarity between them.

I think the poet and the artist saw themselves as workmen, just getting on with it in the best way they knew how. In a poem from The Movie May Be Slightly Different (Victoria University Press, 2011) I can hear them both in Vincent’s voice:

 

Shaping Up

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Most of one’s life – the better part,

let’s say – we’re up to our wrists

in clay, liking that potter’s image

for what we’re handling, the glaze’s

rare shimmer defining it ours.

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A lifetime’s, is that what we said?

The whirr between our palms. Get

the feel of it right.

And the word one

evening, ‘This is it, then. This

is the shape you’ve worked for. This

has to be it.’

Never enough stones handy

to pelt the thing.

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I feel that Vincent’s work is true to the Ralph we knew. In its pages Ralph comes alive again, for me, as does Vincent himself via the ‘rare shimmer’ of his words.

 

 

Gregory O’Brien

Of Vincent’s poetry collections, Blame Vermeer (Victoria University Press) has a special significance for me. It was published in 2007–two years after I spent a week with Vincent (and Tusiata Avia) as guests at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam. During that time Vincent and I struck out for galleries and museums thereabouts, visiting Amsterdam and The Hague as well as making numerous visits to the Boijmans Museum, not far from our hotel in Rotterdam.

We rendezvoused one day at the Mauritshuis in the Hague, having arranged to meet in front of Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’. It was plain to me then, as it is now: Vincent’s poems can be like Vermeer paintings… Many are interiors in which the space between figures (or around a single figure) is carefully evoked, the tone, light and mood are masterfully adjusted and fixed in place.

Time is transfixed in Vincent’s poem ‘Blame Vermeer’, as it is in the painting that inspired it: Vermeer’s ‘The Milkmaid’ (aka ‘The Kitchenmaid’), 1657-8. Vincent was a great observer–of paintings as he was of people, of painterly technique as he was of human nature. He was also a brilliantly attentive student of narrative, as it pertains to paintings, poems, fiction and life itself. His writing was infused with a sense of wonder, as well as knowledge gained. So much to be carrying on with…

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Blame Vermeer

A woman of thirty pours the inch or so of milk
left in a jug, sets the jug high on a shelf
inside a small cupboard because the children
from next door are to stay the night, she’ll
not risk their picking at its precious glaze.
She takes her ring from beside the tap,
slips it back onto her third finger.
She hears steps on the path.
Something
will happen after every painting for a long
time yet. It may have been war,
a sudden wrenching of implacable grief,
diseases arrived from the unburied,
children clattering in only days until
they are shunted east.
And the stranger
announcing, ‘There is something here,’ and her hand
on the lip first then the jug’s smooth curving,
it was lifted, so Jug & Woman
may have been the title again as it was and was
how many hundred times in that small
kitchen, its imagined canvas, the deluging back
of ordinariness so lovely, to what can one
compare it? And the steps always arriving.
It will happen next.

 

 

Fiona Kidman

I found myself poring through all of the Vincent O’Sullivan books I own this morning, and there are many, with a mounting sense of frustration. The poetry collection of his that I love the most is defined by a single particular poem, and I cannot find it, or remember the title. I know it is about a woman standing at a window and waiting. But I know this is irrational. I have most of Vince’s books because I love the work, plus he insisted generously on sending me copies before I could buy them, so each one is a gift in itself and each to be treasured.

I have settled on Nice Morning for it, Adam (Victoria University Press, 2004). Straight away the title speaks to you, in Vince’s wry, laconic voice which echoes the common vernacular which he loved and understood.  There is a love poem in it ‘As though’, which I like a great deal, but it’s not quite the one I’m after. But the book also contains another of my favourites, ‘River Road, due south’. Here the poet is on a bus, in the dark; the reader senses the movement forward, the figure in the night seeking answers, watching the familiar landscape through a particular lens, especially the river that has informed so much of his writing, ending with that quiet tenderness that was so often overlooked in Vincent’s work, an acknowledgement of love. It’s pure O’Sullivan.

 

River Road, due south

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Much of my life it seems I have been on a bus

not so long after the late evening smeared

its flaring rag across the mirror of the river

and the glint that follows of water lying

heavy, and a house on the far side

with a light that burns on the back porch

and a flag of expanding yellow pouring

from the side of a window without a curtain

is as lonely I suppose as a house can seem

as you watch from the river’s far side

and it comes up from the reflecting distance

and holds level there across the water floating

its spilled silence, and drifts back and behind

so it’s night again, night so you can take on trust

the current’s muscling twenty yards off

and the house and the house’s reflection

and the kitchen smells like words you wish

you could easily remember, they are there

as your own sitting in the bus’s hollow

pulse, the dashboard a distant altar

the driver believes in, believes will charm

us past Rangiriri and Taupiri and into

the string of lights that thicken to suburbs

and into the clatter of someone else’s music,

and the house and the river and the dark

either side of the house and it’s lights floating

more important than any star, is back there,

taken by night, and where you were.

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Glenn Colquhoun

I have chosen a poem, rather than a collection – ‘The Child in the Gardens: Winter’.

Vincent always reminded me of my pop. He had the same happy-sad eyes. And he spoke in the same tones too, and with the same hint of old time sorrow.

It was as though he understood and loved the vernacular of my pop’s world — a time when Pākeha were growing into themselves, caught between Europe and somewhere else — long before they had any thought of being Pacific.

Listening to him again his voice is full of hedges and lanes and vegetable gardens in the back yard. He gave these things dignity, raised a glass to their ordinariness, and to their longing. At the same time he always seemed to wonder (ever so gently) how they could be more.

Moe mai e hoa. Ngā mihi nui. Ngā mihi aroha.

 

The Child in the Gardens: Winter from Nice Morning for It, Adam (Victoria University Press, 2004)
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How sudden, this entering the fallen
gardens for the first time, to feel the blisters
of the world’s father, as his own hand
does. It is everything dying at once,
the slimed pond and the riffling of leaves,
shoes drenched across sapless stalks.
It is what you will read a thousand times.
You will come to think, who has not stood
there, holding that large hand, not said
Can’t we go back – I don’t like this place.
Your voice sounds like someone else’s. You
rub a sleeve against your cheek, you want
him to laugh, to say, ‘The early stars can’t hurt
us, they are further than trains we hear
on the clearest of nights.’ We are in a story
called Father, We Must Get Out.
Leaves scritch at the red walls,
a stone lady lies near the pond, eating
dirty grass. It is too sudden, this
walking into time for its first lesson,
its brown wind, its scummed nasty
paths. You know how lovely yellow
is your favourite colour, the kitchen at home.
You touch the big gates as you leave,
the trees stand on their bones, the shoulders
on the vandaled statue are huge cold
eggs. Nothing there wants to move.
You touch the gates and tell them, We
are not coming back to this place. Are we, Dad?

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Across the Divide of Death’

Selina Tusitala Marsh farewells Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard.

 

Across te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa we mourn the death of Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, the acclaimed and influential American Samoan scholar, poet, teacher and environmentalist.

Sinavaiana was born on Tutuila island and grew up in the American South. After she graduated from Sonoma State University she returned to Sāmoa to teach high school. ‘At twenty-three,’ she wrote in Alchemies of Distance (2002), ‘I began to learn about being Samoan.’ After thirty years she returned to the US, awarded an MA in folklore from the University of California Berkeley, and a PhD in American studies from the University of Hawaiʻi. She became a professor of creative writing and Pacific literature at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

 

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Damon Salesa, Vice-chancellor of Auckland University of Technology and author of An Indigenous Ocean, says that ‘Caroline was a powerful and authentic voice, whose work as a scholar was both pathfinding and enabling, bringing literary criticism and indigenous Samoan criticism and culture into intersection.’

Selina Tusitala Marsh, the first Pacific Poet Laureate of New Zealand, was in Sydney when she received word of Sinavaiana’s death. She describes her as ‘a groundbreaking Samoan poet and activist who set the Pacific literary world ablaze with her powerful words and tireless pursuit of social justice. To me and countless other Pacific writers, she was our first literary Nafanua, a fierce warrior goddess wielding the pen to fight for Indigenous rights and to give voice to our people’s struggles.

‘Sinavaiana fearlessly confronted the painful legacies of colonialism and diaspora that have shaped our communities. Her poetry wove together deeply personal reflections with sharply political messages, inspiring us to find courage and resilience in the face of adversity. With every line, she affirmed the beauty, strength and mana of our Samoan heritage.

‘Though we mourn Sinavaiana’s passing as a profound loss, her spirit and impact live on through the many lives she touched. She reminded us that we all have a voice to stand up for our beliefs, speak truth to power, and work towards a more just, equitable future for Pacific peoples everywhere.

‘As I reflect on her legacy, I hear her rallying cry echoing through the generations – urging us to raise our pens and our voices to carry on her life’s work. May we honour Sinavaiana by celebrating our cultures and beliefs, asserting our rights, and lighting the way for others, as she so brightly lit the way for us.

Ia manuia lau malaga, Sinavaiana. Fa’afetai tele lava, thank you, for your inspiration, mentorship and enduring gift of language. Thank you for lighting the way.’

In Alchemies of Distance, Sinavaiana said that poetry ‘has taught me something about distance, about crossing the divide. One thing I’ve learned is that distance has implications, among them, loss and journey.’ She described the symbolic ‘Ua alu atu le afi – passing the fire’ ritual at Samoan gatherings: ‘We call out to each other and the other side answers. We pass the fire back and forth. If the ancestors are with us, this is how we pass it across the divide of death.’

Writing of the sudden death of a former student, Sinavaiana spoke of how during ‘her journey from the earthbound world I will cultivate my vā with her with a tangi, a poem of lament’.

The poem we publish here is a tangi written for Sinavaiana by Selina Tusitala Marsh.

 

Resurrection

for CSG

 

Running along the banks

of the eeling river

glistening under

Morten Bay Figs laden

with flying foxes

black with orange collars

hanging like fat furry mangoes,

where flocks of cockatoo

nest, squawking ivory eggs

high in the branches

of gum trees shedding leaves

and bark like curling skin.

Under the veil of soft morning

light in Parramatta park

I saw a crumpled pizza box

lying in the dewy grass.

 

The ripped cardboard box

spoiled the perfect view

and I tut tut tutted running past:

thoughtless picnickers

where were the cleaners?

It’s been three days already

I’d pick it up myself

but I’m running for time

training on my off day

and there were no bins in sight

how long would I have to carry

someone else’s blight

in an otherwise

serene landscape?

 

2Ks later I run past bins

surely no one would’ve expected me

to have carried someone else’s rubbish

that far?

 

Meantime

my beloved friend’s body

has been found

hammered, cut, and crumpled

in a locked bathroom

in Samoa

in the home of our mutual friend

whose unmedicated

Bipolarism must have pulled her

into its pit

and she couldn’t,

or wouldn’t,

get out of it

instead

she pulled those around her down

into hell

 

No one can believe

the Police report

a hammer and small knife

used to end the life

of my beautiful friend

who in Edinburgh

just months before

gave me the Buddha beads

from her wrist

to ease my troubles

she helped me think through

a friendship that had for too long been heavy

she did an I-ching reading

‘Sister, cut her free.’

 

When we spoke of our mutual friend

likewise she said

‘I’ll keep her at arm’s length to save my strength’

yet

months later I saw

she was helping run

creative writing workshops in Samoa

I wrote her “Be careful”

Meaning be careful with your energy, time and money

I never foresaw danger to her body

 

Headlines blast:

‘Playwright charged for gruesome murder’

our mutual friend’s photo

frontpage, centre

And we are filled with blue grief

And we are filled with black rage.

Insane fucking bitch. Crazy evil witch.

 

And yet

 

I ran by a crumpled pizza box

this morning

for the third day

in a row

waiting for resurrection.

 

.