Iona Winter
Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka (Huia, 2021), 350pp, $35
Whiti Hereaka (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa, Tūhourangi, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tumatawera, Tainui, Pākehā) holds an MA in Creative Writing from the IIML. A screenwriter, novelist, playwright, barrister and solicitor, she has been shortlisted and won awards for both her scriptwriting and her three novels: The Graphologist’s Apprentice (2010), Bugs (2013) and Legacy (2018). And now we have Kurangaituku, shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in 2022. E hika, this wahine is consistent! In addition, I think it’s fair to say (and widely publicised) that Hereaka is also a whizz at creating captivating bird-woman attire for book launches. [Read more…]
‘Female, nude’, the opening poem of Joanna Preston’s sophomore collection tumble, makes itself known with steely assuredness:
‘If I could turn back time,’ sang Cher in her 1989 smash hit. ‘If I could find a way,’ she says, she would unsay all the hurtful words that had brought a sad end to her relationship. We can’t, of course, take back ‘all those words that have hurt’. Mere mortals and insomniacs especially are condemned instead to endlessly revisit the mistakes of our own history, impotent to avoid or undo the damage done by our younger selves. But what if we could? Just how far would we be willing to go to alter the fabric of the past, and therefore the present and future, of ourselves and those we love?
The Forgotten Coast by Richard Shaw is a new addition to Massey University Press’ short memoir series. Shaw is Professor of Politics at Massey University, and his memoir looks to fill in the gaps of his own forgotten story. In part, it is an attempt to personally respond to Rachel Buchanan’s The Parihaka Album: Lest We Forget, in which she asks:
Until relatively recently, Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) seemed like one of literary and academic Aotearoa’s best-kept secrets. Whether parsing the poetry of Robert Sullivan, tracing the genealogical and creative connections between Māori and Pacific peoples, reformulating methodologies for Indigenous biography, history and literary scholarship, or dissecting the alienation of not-quite-belonging in either the English Department or Māori Studies, she is some kind of genius. And then she was awarded a Marsden Fund grant, published Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook, contributed a heartrending chapter to Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface (Otago University Press, 2021) and delivered the 2021 Michael King Memorial Lecture. Irrepressible. With the publication of this accessible BWB Text alongside her other projects, Te Punga Somerville will be recognised as an invaluable public intellectual for so-called ‘post-colonial’ Aotearoa.