Poet, novelist and critic C K Stead recalls his first books I published two books in 1964 when I was 31, a collection of poems, Whether the Will is Free, and The New Poetic (in later editions The New Poetic,…
Brian Easton poses the question: is New Zealand still fair? New Zealand public rhetoric is riddled with references to “fairness”, but how important is the notion in actual policy? Every day someone sensitive to the issues of equity and inequality…
In the first of two extracts from her 2012 Janet Frame lecture, Marilyn Duckworth looks back on her literary life. Reflections can startle when one peers across more than 50 years – the length of my time as a published…
Camille Guy recounts how she went from “four eyes” to “blindie”, and its effect on her reading. The printed word fascinated me always. Sitting on the mat at Waterview Primary School in the early 1950s, I watched infant mistress Mrs…
Christchurch resident Isa Moynihan recalls earthquakes she has known. The first was a kind of welcome-to-New Zealand. We’d arrived in New Plymouth in late January, in time for school’s reopening. Early on our first Saturday morning we were woken by…
Former bookshop owner Patricia Morrison explains her passion for getting the right books into prisons. After owning Marsden Books, a “real” bookshop in Karori, Wellington, for 12 years, I had serious misgivings about how I would feed my book obsession.…
Rhys Brookbanks with an insider’s view on the Book Discussion Scheme, a not-for-profit organisation providing books to more than 850 book groups. I work part-time at the Book Discussion Scheme (BDS), and every morning, bundles slide down the conveyor-belt from…
Mary Varnham of Awa Press laments the senselessness of slimmed-down awards. In 2006 a modest paperback of just 25,000 words and one eight-page colour insert section won a Montana New Zealand Book Award in the awkwardly named “Lifestyle and Contemporary Culture”…
In the first of a two-part series, Chris Else examines the evolutionary explanation of art argued in two recent books. In 1975 E O Wilson published Sociobiology. It initiated a debate that has raged ever since over the idea that…