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Leading Pacific poet, performer and children’s author Tusiata Avia has travelled the world performing her award winning one-woman poetry show based on her 2004 collection Wild Dogs Under My Skirt. Her collection The Savage Coloniser Book (VUP, 2020) won the Mary and Peter Biggs prize for poetry at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, making Tusiata the first Pacific woman to win this prize in the Awards’ 53-year history. Tusiata’s poetry collection Fale Aitu │ Spirit House (VUP, 2016) was shortlisted for the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Writer Nafanua Kersel describes Tusiata’s poetry as ‘a full-body plunge in winter seas. It’s breathtaking, skin tingling and teeth rattling. I feel alive.’

Tusiata has received many significant awards including the 2013 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, a 2023 Te Herenga Waka Distinguished Alumni Award, and the 2024 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement. In 2020, she was an Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate, and was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. In 2024, Tusiata received a Creative New Zealand Senior Pacific Artists Award. Tusiata has also held a number of residencies including the Fulbright Pacific Writer’s Fellowship at University of Hawai’i (2005) and the Ursula Bethel Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury (2010). Recently she was appointed Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) and Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence for 2026.

Tusiata’s The Savage Coloniser Book is a personal and political reckoning in which she addresses James Cook in fury. She unravels the 2019 Christchurch massacre, walking us back to the beginning. She describes the contortions we make to avoid blame. And she locates the many voices that offer hope.

Big Fat Brown Bitch (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023) is a brilliant and eviscerating work that includes poems of defiance, confrontation, consolation, satire, sorrow and fury. Big Fat Brown Bitch was longlisted for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.

Her most recent collection, Giving Birth to My Father (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025), is an extraordinarily rich poetic work about grief and renewal that will rearrange its readers. Giving Birth to My Father takes in a world of family and memory, including a sequence of poems about a much-loved brother as he faces a life-threatening injury. It is a book about ways of holding one another even after we are gone. 

 

 

Links

Tusiata Avia’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre poet page

Victoria University Press author page

Wikipedia

ANZRB review of Big Fat Brown Bitch (Dec, 2023)

Stuff interview: Tusiata discusses The Savage Coloniser Book and her inspiration (May, 2021)

TVNZ Breakfast: Monique Fiso and Tusiata Avia reflect on wins at Ockham Book Awards (May, 2021)

ANZL review of The Savage Coloniser Book (Oct, 2020)