Aotearoa New Zealand

Introduction

Aotearoa New Zealand was rocked by the loss of two literary powerhouses in 2024: Fleur Adcock and Vincent O’Sullivan. An expanded edition of Adcock’s Collected Poems [Poetry] was published to coincide with her 90^th birthday and covers the full span of her work from 1964 until 2024. Celebrated for her conversational style, psychological insight and barbed wit, she opened up new subjects for poetry, such as birth, smoking, celibacy, old age, masturbation, illness and bereavement. She was a pioneer in British and New Zealand poetry, her editor Neil Astley emphasising her inspiration for the “generations of women poets who followed her”, her work “helping bring about the huge shift which has made poetry publishing much more diverse, inclusive and representative of all writers in both of her countries” (Otago Daily Times 30 November). Living most of her adult life in Britian, Adcock’s poetry also meditates on her complex relationship with New Zealand, from her family history to New Zealand’s colonial history. She was the editor of The Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (1982) and The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Women’s Poetry (1987). Adcock received the New Zealand Prime Minister’s award for literary achievement in poetry in 2019 and won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006 for Poems 1960-2000, becoming only the seventh female poet to receive the award.

O’Sullivan was a titan of New Zealand literature, publishing poetry, plays, short stories and novels, including Let the River Stand and All This By Chance. An influential academic who taught at The University of Waikato and Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, he inspired generations of writers and scholars through his passion for New Zealand literature and wise supervisory counsel. He was joint editor with Margaret Scott of the internationally acclaimed five-volume Letters of Katherine Mansfield and the author of biographies of John Mulgan and Ralph Hotere. O’Sullivan was New Zealand’s Poet Laureate from 2013–2015 and in 2000 he was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, redesignated as a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit Zealand in 2021.

O’Sullivan’s final collection of poems, Still Is [Poetry], was described by Sophie van Waardenberg as a “book rich with wonder”. The 90 new poems reflect on the art of poetry itself, revealing that poetry is not always in the poet’s control and might not give us answers (“I don’t go for asking questions once a poem has settled”), but that it can vividly “capture speech and thought” (Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books 19 July). Full of appreciation for the small beauties and joys of life (“a child wishing to find a nasturtium / the stroked cheek”), even as it poignantly acknowledges morality and loss, these lines from “Get This” capture the songlike centre of the collection:

the heart, we insist, meaning true to us

most, the beat we walk to, our hope, get this.

Love, our last possible word, get this.

2024 was another year of stellar poetry publications from both our University Presses and independent and small presses. Rex Letoa Paget took out the Jessie Mackay Prize for poetry, with his debut Manuali’i, published by Saufo`i Press. Manuali’i is a sumptuous collection of glittering poetry which invites the reader into communion with the poet, into a journey of rooting and rerouting, revelation and revelling, remembering and dreaming.

Winner of the Ockham New Zealand Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry, Emma Neale’s Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit explores the power of language to tell truth and untruth, to connect and conceal; to conjure the real and the unreal, and the indeterminate spaces in between. Loaded with 85 rich and wide-ranging poems, and threaded with playful language, Ockham judges identified Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit as a book with compassion at its core.

Tracey Slaughter’s collection The Girls in the Red House Are Singing steps into embodied sites of pain, excising repressed truths and hidden harms with her signature razor-sharp language and unflinching focus. Carin Smeaton is another of our poets who writes with palpable voice and body, tenderness and grit. Her collection Hibiscus Tart is dedicated to mana wāhine (strong women): “It’s for all you bloody tarts out there doing the hard mahi, equalising the battle field, feeding the fam, calling the karanga (ceremonial call), surviving, representing, past, present and future.” Another work which celebrates mana wāhine is Stacey Teague’s Plastic. Plastic is a poetic love letter to whānau (family) and te ao Māori (Māori worldview), woven with spell and whakapapa (genealogy). It is a taonga (treasure) humming with voice and aroha.

This year, the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry went to Māori playwright, novelist, and poet Apirana Taylor. Neville Peat, best known for his work on New Zealand’s regional history, received the prize for Non-Fiction and Dame Lynley Dodd, who is known throughout the world for her lovable series Hairy Maclary received the prize for Fiction.

At the New Zealand Book Awards the Jan Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction went to Damien Wilkins for Delirious [Fiction], an emotionally powerful novel about family dynamics and ageing that raises important questions about duty of care. The other finalists for this award likewise possess a raw emotional depth and complexity. Haunting, sharp and profound, Laurence Fearnley’s At the Grand Glacier Hotel is a beautifully crafted novel, drawing heavily on soundscapes, and offering a moving portrait of physical and emotional recovery. Tina Makeriti’s The Mires is a pulsating novel, its heart beating with both ferocity and tenderness. Juxtaposing the lives of three very different women, it reflects on a modern world of catastrophic challenges to both our environment and our social connections with insight and grace. Kirsty Gunn’s third collection of short stories Pretty Ugly is full of unease, thorns and jealousy. Gunn is an author willing to confront difficult truths and uncomfortable stories, exposing human cruelty but also aware of human dreams, love and possibility.

David Coventry’s Performance [Fiction], a work of creative non-fiction about his experience with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), showcases — through its subtitle “A Novel”, fantastical flights of fantasy and the incorporation of multiple perspectives — the power of fiction to show us who we are. Lauren Keenan’s The Space Between is a gripping novel set during the New Zealand Wars in 1860 that foregrounds the power of hope, the unbreakable bonds of whenua (land) and whanau (family) and the catastrophe of war. Becky Manawatu followed up her sensational hit Auē with Kataraina [Fiction], an electrifying sequel which moves between temporal moments. Monty Soutar likewise published a sequel to his best-selling Kāwai, with Kāwai: Tree of Nourishment [Fiction], which strikes just as hard into the heart of colonisation’s impact on Māori.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s graphic narratives continued to carve out their niche, with Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus publishing its sixth and seventh editions and the debut of Alex Scott’s Episodes [both Fiction]. Episodes, a searing critique of our media-obsessed society, is drawn in a similar mode to the work of Nick Drnaso but steeped in the traditions of fellow New Zealanders like Dylan Horrocks and Ross Murray. Di Morris’ The Writing Desk [Fiction] is a beautifully drawn comic that highlights both colonial and modern gender imbalances. The Dean Ballinger Anthology [Anthologies] collects two works by the late Dean Ballinger (1973-2022), a creative who shaped the comics scene in the Waikato, and whose loss was felt all over Aotearoa.

Local drama continues to thrive in Aotearoa, with exemplary new work with Sam Brooks’ Lads on the Island, Jamie McCaskill’s Two Guitars and William Duignan’s and the Lochburns all premiering at Circa Theatre in Wellington, and Joni Nelson’s For Country and Albert Belz’s Hyperspace premiering at Auckland Theatre Company. A highlight from Circa Theatre’s season was Transmission: Beta, the sequel to 2021’s Transmission. This play, made from writer Stuart McKenzie’s interviews with politicians, reporters, epidemiologists and protesters, tells of the fallout of the COVID vaccine rollout, the subsequent parliamentary protest, and eventual resignation of Jacinda Ardern. Roger Hall’s play End of Summer Time also premiered, which reconnected lovable curmudgeon Dickey Hart with audiences. First appearing in C’mon Black! and You Gotta Be Joking!, Dickey, now much older, struggles with city life and COVID lockdowns.

Acclaimed companies A Slightly Isolated Dog and Trick of the Light Theatre returned to our stages, with Our Own Little Mess and Suitcase Show, respectively. Eleanor Bishop and Karen McCracken continued to charm audiences with their new play Gravity & Grace and a revival of their 2023 show Heartbreak Hotel, which toured to Edinburgh. Tusiata Avia’s Ockham winning poetry collection The Savage Coloniser Book was adapted into The Savage Coloniser Show, which swept the Wellington Theatre Awards. Pasifika works continued to be highlighted by the Tala imprint of Playmarket, with publications of Odd Daphne by Joshua Iosefo, My Own Darling by Grace Iwashita-Taylor, Ranterstantrum by Victor Rodger, and The Eel and Sina by J. Soo Choon [Drama]. In addition, Playmarket published Ka Tahi, Ka Rua, Ka Toru, Ka Whā: Four Plays for Solo Performance, which contains work by Micky Delahunty, Briar Grace-Smith, Anya Tate-Manning and Apirana Taylor [Anthologies]. The first anthology of performance art in Aotearoa New Zealand, Resetting Coordinates, offers a lively critical survey of 50 years of our globally unique performance art scene [Anthologies].

An anthology of particular note is Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by David Eggleton, Vaughan Rapatahana and Mere Taito. The anthology’s title — itself a hybrid word of “kavei” (to navigate) and “tūi” (a bird with two voice boxes) — speaks of duality, of speaking in two voices. This highlights, as the editors write, “the complexities Pasifika poets and peoples must negotiate every day” (8).

Aotearoa New Zealand continued its tradition of beautifully crafted memoir and essays, with relationships with the past and the complexities of identity being a common thread. Flora Feltham’s Bad Archive [Letters and Auto/biography] is a bold, expertly woven collection of personal essays about memory. Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku’s Hine Toa [Letters and Auto/biography] is an extraordinary memoir by a trailblazing voice in the women’s, queer, and Māori liberation movements. Una Cruickshank’s The Chthonic Cycle [Non-Fiction] takes us from the outer points of the universe to the microscopic, in a series of essays about the state of our planet, and its inhabitants. In The Unsettled [Letters and Auto/biography], Richard Shaw takes the reader on a journey through the unsettled past, present and future of New Zealand and those that call this country home. In The Beautiful Afternoon [Letters and Auto/biography], Airini Beautrais allows the many strands of her identity and upbringing to collide in her wide-ranging collection of personal essays. This elasticity of the self is part of Whaea Blue [Letters and Auto/biography], Talia Marshall’s outstanding memoir which unravels not only her whakapapa, but time itself.

Several major books of literary criticism opened up new areas of investigation [all Criticism: General Studies]. Dougal McNeill’s Forms of Freedom approaches New Zealand and Australian literature from a Marxist perspective. This meditation on the way in which creative works can influence progressive social change ranges widely through New Zealand literature, from Elsie Locke and Hone Tuwhare, to Emily Perkins and Pip Adams, to Alice Tauwhai and Patrica Grace. Daniel McKay’s Beyond Hostile Islands is a comparative study of American and New Zealand fiction against the backdrop of war in the Pacific. An array of New Zealand texts are profiled, including Errol Brathwaite’s An Affair of Men (1962), Keri Hulme’s “Kaibutsu-san” (1985), Wendy Catran’s The Swap (2004), Peter Wells’ Lucky Bastard (2007) and James George's Ocean Roads (2006). New Zealand Medievalisms explores New Zealand’s artistic and scholarly engagement with the Middle Ages, most famously seen in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Nicola Daly’s Language, Identity and Diversity in Picturebooks provides an Aotearoa New Zealand perspective on the genre, exploring Māori-English bilingual picturebooks and examining how picturebooks featuring Māori, English, New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) and Pacific languages reflect identity and support diversity in society.

A similar diversity is to be found in the variety of individual authors who received critical attention [all Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers]. Katherine Mansfield was once again the most written about author, with standout publications including Katherine Mansfield and London and chapters in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives. Other foundational twentieth-century New Zealand authors likewise enticed critics, with Tom Romeo grappling with unsettling truths in Janet Frame’s A State of Siege and William Shaw exploring trauma and horror in David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Sexual identity preoccupied several scholars, from Mark Houlahan’s analysis of Bruce Mason’s “Queer Baroque”, to Jana Fedtke’s meditation of asexual subjectivity in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, to Chris Brickell profile of queer themes in Robert Lord’s plays.

Contemporary New Zealand writing also attracted scholars. For Mita Banerjee, Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider is the access point for exploring the concept of personhood in relation to rivers, while Marine Berthiot also focused on a text set in small-town Aotearoa, with Whiti Hereaka’s Bugs at the heart of this discussion of Māori cultural trauma. Romantic desire of all kinds appealed, with Paloma Fresno-Calleja revelling in Kate O’Keefe’s Wellington-set chick-lit and Nicolas Wright locating Hera Lindsay Bird in a tradition of lyric poets exploring “Ways of Making Love”. The complex relationships authors have with other authors was the focus of Katherine Ebury’s discussion of Sarah Laing’s Mansfield-focused memoir and Jan Cronin’s exploration of Patrick Evans’ Gifted, which reimagines the relationship between Janet Frame and Frank Sargeson.

It seems fitting to end with two scholarly articles that take us full circle to the two authors whose lives we celebrate and whose loss we mourn. For Yuxuan Wu it is the imagery of clothing in Fleur Adcock’s poetry that fascinates, while Heidi Thomson provides a wide-ranging, personal retrospective on Vincent O’Sullivan’s writing and academic life.