Aotearoa New Zealand

Introduction

“Lockdown happened to all of us,” writes Toby Morris in Lockdown: Tales from Aotearoa, describing lockdown as a rare “truly universal experience”. Lockdown is a collection of responses to COVID-19 from nineteen graphic and comic artists who capture a range of experiences of the pandemic, from uncertainty and claustrophobia to the reserved joys of working from home. Our Introduction to last year’s bibliographic listings charted the many ways in which the pandemic shaped our lives, from illness and heightened anxiety, to lockdowns, to the rise in digital communication and events. Here we reflect on some of the creative responses to the pandemic, in the process acknowledging both our incredible privilege in Aotearoa New Zealand of leading relatively “normal” lives in the second half of 2020, and our sympathy for the ongoing destabilising and tragic effects of the virus in so much of the world.

One of the more positive effects of the 2020 lockdown and the consequent revival in various forms of home entertainment is the increased appetite for books. Reading has undergone something of a renaissance, highlighted by the establishment of several new bookshops. Bookety Book Books is an online retailer based in Wānaka, founded in 2020 during the nationwide lockdown. Mandy Myles describes her creation as “THE book club of all book clubs”. All books purchased are sent within a couple of days individually wrapped with sustainable packaging. There are regular Zoom discussions for readers keen to talk about the month’s book club pick and a website (https://www.booketybookbooks.co.nz/) provides a place for discussion and reviews. Good Books (https://goodbookshop.nz/) is a striking addition to bookstores in central Wellington. This beautiful atrium style space will be ideal for book launches. It boasts great curation of new and classic books, with excellent New Zealand poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and exquisite stationery and notebooks. Mrs Blackwell’s Village Bookshop opened in December 2020 in Greytown. Honouring reading heritage, the charming bookstore is located in what once was Greytown Library. Readers were also relieved at the reboot of the New Zealand Listener in the second half of the year, after its closure in April.

As in the rest of the world, social distancing forced the closure of theatres and productions. During lockdown, many companies were forced to postpone or cancel, or indeed move their live art online. Auckland Theatre Company’s Chekhov’s The Seagull, written by Eli Kent and Eleanor Bishop, was repurposed for the digital screen. Delivered in 30-minute instalments over four weeks in May, Chekhov’s characters were reimagined with a Kiwi twist and congregated over Zoom. When theatres could re-open in the latter half of the year, there was a boom in productions, with small and large companies alike taking advantage of the lack of international touring shows. Trick of the Light Theatre revived their production of The Road That Wasn’t There, as well as their new show Tröll about the early stages and dangers of the Internet. Other new works included The Glitter Garden by George Fowler and Lori Leigh, the world’s first drag musical extravaganza for children, and Stanley Makuwe’s Black Lover, a gripping drama about war, politics, and colonialism. Inspired by Bocaccio’s The Decameron, 48 Nights on Hope Street by Freya Daly Sadgrove, Leki Jackson-Bourke, Nathan Joe, Ana Scotney and Cian Elyse White focuses on the experiences of five flatmates during 48 nights of lockdown. Briar Grace-Smith’s masterpiece Purapurawhetū — complete with a new introduction and academic supplements — has been republished by Playmarket.

A wealth of poetry was published in 2020. The Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry went to Tusiata Avia for The Savage Coloniser Book. The collection looks both to the past and to the present, addressing “histories of violence” and loss, and the ongoing impact of colonisation within Aotearoa and the world. The collection speaks powerfully across time and place, exploring a wide range of contemporary concerns, including the Black Lives Matter movement, the plight of refugees on Manus Island, and xenophobia in light of the devastating 2019 Christchurch terror attacks. The collection also centres Pacific stories, prioritising Samoan and Tongan voices both in content and poetic register. Avia is the first Pasifika woman to win the award.

Jackson Nieuwland’s I Am a Human Being received the Jessie Mackay Prize for best first book of poetry. The collection, published by Compound Press, explores personal identity and traverses the surreal, with each poem beginning with the invocation “I am”. This is a collection full of contradiction, play, rich imagery, and tender imagination.

2020 saw the publication of collections by established and acclaimed poets. Bill Manhire’s Wow opens with the image of the extinct Huia and a sense of impermanence shapes the collection. Michele Leggott’s Mezzaluna gathers work from Leggott’s nine collections and explores the poet’s loss of sight and her continuing joy in the written word. Kate Camp’s How to Be Happy though Human opens with a suite of new work and features her signature deft humour and striking imagery.

Poetry continues to celebrate the particulars of this place. Pasifika writer Karlo Mila’s Goddess Muscle, published by Huia Publishers, explores the personal and the political. It is a collection which celebrates the medium of the book, featuring richly coloured pages and poetic forms which traverse the page and revel in movement. Poems flow down the page as in “Te Awa” (a river) and are elsewhere sliced through with slashes. Mila speaks in conversation with other Aotearoa poets, including Hone Tuwhare and J. C. Sturm, and the collection is well-stocked with love letters. The Lifers by Michael Steven is a collection steeped in place. It is filled with poetry rich in the sensory grit of old towns, pubs, airports and gravesites. The featured poet in Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2020 was essa may ranapiri, a rising star in our poetry skies. ranapiri’s section “HAUNT|HUNT” explores the ghosts and harms of colonisation, capitalism, and discrimination, and is a testament to the vital, experimental poetry alive in Aotearoa New Zealand.

One publication from 2020 is a celebration which nevertheless marks a loss. A Vase and a Vast Sea serves as a “reunion” of writers involved with the Whitireia creative writing programme over its 26-year history. While the Creative Writing major was closed at the end of 2019, this collection is a precious keepsake of an innovative and nurturing space for emerging writers in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The fiction finalists at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards were a diverse mix of stories, ranging from the terrors of the Holocaust to a swinger’s party in the early 1980s. Pip Adam’s Nothing to See focuses on Peggy and Greta, who are recovering alcoholics (or rather, one alcoholic who has splintered into two), over several decades, in a scathing look at surveillance, identity, gender, and capitalism. It is a disorientating and captivating read. Catherine Chidgey’s Remote Sympathy is a haunting, vivid novel set against the backdrop of Buchenwald concentration camp. Told through letters, interviews, and diary entries, and from four different angles, the novel is harrowing and tender. Sprigs by Brannavan Gnanalingam is a nuanced, seething, and often comedic look at violence, racism, and toxic masculinity. Through a large cast of characters, the novel looks at the consequences of a sexual assault at a high school rugby game after-match, and the ripple effect of trauma that follows.

The winner of the prestigious Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction was Airini Beautrais for Bug Week & Other Stories, her first venture outside of poetry. This is the first time in more than a decade that a collection of short stories has received the prize. Bug Week received great acclaim, for its daring and wit. Stories range from the absurd to the quietly domestic, probing the weird, the wry and the grotesque. The collection captures many perspectives, including a southern royal albatross warning against overfishing at an open-mic night and the account of a dead woman watching her newly departed body being defiled by a male doctor. Guest international co-judge Tommy Orange said of the collection “if the book were a bug it would be a big one, with teeth and venom, with wings and a surprising heart, possibly several, beating on every page with life”.

Relationships, however eclectic, seem to be the through line for New Zealand fiction in 2020. Chloe Lane’s The Swimmers is as much about maternal relationships as it is about merciful death. Lane explores motor neurone disease in a resonating, beautifully written and fiercely candid way. Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss is an intense but witty novel, meditating on mental illness with authenticity and nuance and highlighting the ways in which the protagonist Martha’s family constantly fail her. Amy McDaid’s satiric Fake Baby follows three characters whose lives briefly intersect but whose deeper connection lies in the lack of love in their lives and the small kindnesses that offer hope. Mikaela Nyman’s Sado focuses on the relationship between tradition and modernity, friends and family, cultures, and community in the wake of a cyclone in Vanuatu. David Coventry’s Dance Prone, a tense and lyrical novel, clashing the post-punk period with the modern day, is centred on indie-rock, life on the road, and the players’ relationship to violence, peace, and hate. 2000ft above Worry Level, the debut novel by Eamonn Marra, is an episodic tale of modern 20-somethings, and all the trials and tribulations that come with being one. The pressure of and relationship with capitalism forces unemotive language to the surface, covering what stirs beneath. Ian Wedde’s The Reed Warbler is an epic saga that follows a family across generations, woven together through a strong and haunting set of narrative voices.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s contribution to the medium of the graphic narrative continued in 2020, with beautiful work for all ages. Tara Black’s This Is Not a Pipe is unsettling and stark in its surrealism. Focusing on Beth, a woman with a pole through her arms, it presents in painful monochrome an absurd tale of reality. Selina Tusitala Marsh followed up her 2019 work Mophead with Mophead Tu: The Queen’s Poem. Like its predecessor, it is a compelling book about self-identity and the restorative power of art as well as a meditation on the long-lasting effects of colonialism. Whilst Marsh’s graphic is aimed at children, in 2020, Massey University Press started their Korero series, which aims to make “story books for grown-ups” that showcase New Zealand writers and artists collaborating in a dynamic way. High Wire by Lloyd Jones and Euan Macleod details the mystery of art, aspiration, and friendship, and reflects on the liminal space beneath the worlds we traverse. Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde brings together award-winning novelist Paula Morris and renowned photographer Haru Sameshima to focus on literary icon Robin Hyde.

Auckland University Press released three Māori translations to expand te reo Māori readership and the accessibility of stories to tangata whenua: Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist; Dr Seuss’ Oh, the Places You’ll Go!; and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. These three translations are part of an initiative, Kotahi Rau Pukapuka, which aims to translate one hundred books into Māori. The initiative also saw the publication of Mātāmua ko te Kupu!, a detailed look into the performative aspects of Māori culture, from haka and waiata, to hui on marae. In the last decade, fewer than ten books aimed at adults have been published in te reo Māori, and Kotahi Rau Pukapuka aims to change that.

The winner of the Ockham Award for General Non-Fiction was Vincent O’Sullivan’s The Dark Is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere — A Biographical Portrait. O’Sullivan gives a sensitive, detailed portrait of one of Aotearoa’s most important artists, shaped by the four pillars of Hotere’s identity: his Māoritanga, faith, whenua (place), and whānau (family). Two iconic figures in New Zealand literature, Denis Glover and C.K. Stead, were the focus of major publications. The Letters of Denis Glover, selected and edited by Sarah Shieff, features around 500 letters, drawing on a vast archive of material, to give a rounded picture of the esteemed poet and printer. Following his first volume of autobiography, C.K. Stead returns with You Have a Lot to Lose: A Memoir, 1956–1986. From graduate school to the Springbok Tour, Stead provides a tumultuous tale of 30 years of rapid change. It is a complex record of New Zealand’s intellectual and cultural history by a commentator whose life is steeped in books.

Literary scholars were inspired by both historic and contemporary authors. The transnational connections of 19^th-century settlement literature are at the forefront of both Stefanie Herades’ exploration of colonial literature and the global marketplace, and Philip Steer’s Settler Colonialism. Steer’s illuminating work explores the complex networks of British, Australian, and New Zealand literature and the many ways in which Victorian literature was shaped by settlement culture. Chapter Three is of note for devotees of New Zealand literature, with a focus on what Steer terms “speculative utopianism” in works by Julius Vogel, Samuel Butler, H.C. Marriott Watson, and Anthony Trollope.

2020 was a prolific year for Katherine Mansfield scholarship, with the comprehensive Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield and the collection Katherine Mansfield and Bliss and Other Stories in celebration of the centenary of Bliss’s publication. A special issue of the Journal of New Zealand Literature ranged widely through Mansfield’s life and legacy, approaching her work from epistolary, biographical, feminist, and psycholinguistic perspectives. The intersections between Mansfield and other cultures and authors was a dominant strand, with a discussion of her relationship with China and comparative essays on Mansfield and Anita Desai, William Wordsworth, and Virginia Woolf. New Zealand Modernist writers also featured in a special issue of Modernist Cultures, with articles on D’Arcy Cresswell, Keri Hulme, and Rudall Haywood, and in the collection New Oceania, which included chapters on Hone Tuwhare, Albert Wendt, and the Te Ao Hou journal.

Contemporary writing was profiled, with articles on James George’s Ocean Roads, Fiona Kidman’s Ricochet Baby, David Hair’s Aotearoa series, and the poetry of Michael Harlow and Dinah Hawken. Nicholas Birns focused on the “Marvellous Year” of 2005–2006 with an article comparing novels by Elizabeth Knox, Patricia Grace, Lloyd Jones, and Bernard Beckett. Recent interest in contemporary theatre continued, with articles on decoloniality and Asian Theatre in New Zealand, the international success of Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis’s collaborations, and Eleanor Bishop’s feminist deconstruction of Foreskin’s Lament in BOYS.

The Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement acknowledged three masters of the craft and outstanding representatives of the New Zealand Literary community. Tessa Duder, best known for her Young Adult fiction, was honoured, as was former poet laureate Jenny Bornholdt, and Sir Tīmoti Kāretu, a leading academic of Māori language and the performing arts.

Aotearoa New Zealand farewelled two important social commentators and historians. Historian Dick Scott’s Ask the Mountain (1976) was hailed by former Prime Minister Helen Clark as “one of New Zealand’s most important books”, with Kerry Taylor describing this history of the peaceful resistance campaign at Parihaka as “fundamental to a change in Pākehā consciousness to the darker reality of colonialism” (Stuff, 11 January). Resisting oppression was a key theme in Scott’s work, also prominent in his 1952 history of the waterfront lockdown 151 Days. Gordon McLauchlan was equally critical of aspects of New Zealand culture, his 1976 The Passionless People eviscerating Pākehā New Zealand as a society of complacent, smug, “smiling zombies”. As editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Encyclopaedia and author of short histories of New Zealand and the New Zealand Wars, McLauchlan provided a window on the nation’s past as well as present. McLaughlan had a long association with the work of Frank Sargeson as a member of the Frank Sargeson Trust and the author of the play The Last Days of Frank Sargeson.

Dean Parker, playwright and screenwriter, also passed away in 2020. He was the inaugural 2012 winner of the Playmarket Award. His long playwriting career spans from Smack, produced at Downstage in 1974, to the 2020 production of Wonderful at Wellington’s Circa Theatre. Political themes preoccupied Parker in works as diverse as Tigers of Wrath, The Hollow Men, Other People’s Wars, and Midnight in Moscow, and he was an acclaimed scriptwriter, perhaps most famous for his screenplay for Came a Hot Friday.