Books published by Otago University Press

Dan Davin, one of New Zealand's acknowledged masters of the short story, was born in Invercargill in 1913. The Gorse Blooms Pale gathers together twenty-six stories and a selection of poems reflecting his experiences while growing up in an Irish–New Zealand family in Southland. Comic, haunting, poetic, profound, and lyrical, the stories have a regional flavour quite unlike any other body of work in New Zealand literature. They insightfully capture the character of a close-knit rural community and its post-British social relationships and tribulations, with a flair equal to such other New Zealand writers as Sargeson, Frame, Middleton, or Marshall. The Gorse Blooms Pale is a rare treasure in the landscape of twentieth-century New Zealand literature.

"We Will Not Cease is the unflinching account of New Zealander Archibald Baxter's brutal treatment as a conscientious objector during World War I.In 1915, when Baxter was 33, he was arrested, sent to prison, then shipped under guard to Europe where he was forced to the front line against his will. Punished to the limits of his physical and mental endurance, Baxter was stripped of all dignity, beaten, starved and left for dead by the New Zealand military. In the final attempt to discredit him authorities consigned him to a mental institution, an experience that would haunt him for the rest of his life.Long regarded as a classic, We Will Not Cease is as relevant now as when it was first published in 1939. This revised edition has a new foreword by Kevin Clements (foundation director of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies), a brand new cover, and a full index"--Publisher's website.

David Eggleton, Poet Laureate of Aotearoa 2019-21, has published nine poetry collections, and now, finally, comes a 'Best Of '. The Wilder Years: Selected Poems is a hardback compendium of the poet's own selection from 35 years of published work, together with a handful of new poems. Cover art by Nigel Brown.

One of New Zealand's most versatile writers, Fiona Farrell has published four collections of poetry over 25 years, from Cutting Out (1987) to The Broken Book (2011). Noun, verbs, etc. collects the best work from these books and intersperses them with other poems thus far 'uncollected.' The themes are wide ranging: political and personal, regional and global, including love and birth and death, war and emigration, history and landscape. The poems mix lyricism with the flat and plainspoken mode of Kiwi vernacular; they channel voices infrequently heard in poetry in traditional song and ballad forms. They are well crafted but unpretentious, jokey yet illuminating, self-deprecating but wise, sad, funny, and deeply human.

In the aftermath of the Christchurch terrorist attacks of 15 March 2019, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared: 'We are all New Zealanders.' These words resonated, an instant meme that asserted our national diversity and inclusiveness and, at the same time, issued a rebuke to hatred and divisiveness. Ko Aotearoa Tatou We Are New Zealand is bursting with new works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art created in response to the editors' questions: What is New Zealand now, in all its rich variety and contradiction, darkness and light? Who are New Zealanders? The works flowed in from well-known names and new voices, from writers and artists from Kerikeri to Bluff. Some are teenagers still at school; some are in their eighties. Maori, Pakeha, Pasifika, Asian, new migrants, young voices, queer writers, social warriors...Aotearoa's many faces are represented in this unique and important compendium. In a society where the arts, especially marginalised arts, are under threat, this anthology shows that creative work can explore, document, interrogate, re-imagine--and celebrate--who we are as citizens of this diverse country, in a diverse world.

Landfall is New Zealand's foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, as well as biographical and critical essays, and cultural commentary. Each issue brims with a mix of vital new work by this country's best writers. There are reviews of the latest books, art, film, drama, and dance. Landfall is a high-quality production, with artist portfolios in full colour.

Originally published in 2001, A City Possessed is the harrowing account of one of New Zealand's most high-profile criminal cases – a story of child sexual abuse allegations, gender politics and the law.In detailing the events of the 1990s that led up to and surrounded the allegations made against several staff of the Christchurch Civic Cre`che, author Lynley Hood shows how and why such a case could happen. A City Possessed won the Montana Medal for Non-Fiction at the 2002 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.Her penetrating analysis of the social and legal processes by which the conviction of Peter Ellis was obtained, and repeatedly upheld, raises major issues for our justice system and the way we see ourselves. Peter Ellis served seven years of a 10-year jail sentence for abusing seven children at the Christchurch Civic Cre`che. He has always maintained his innocence, and has gained widespread support for what many see as a miscarriage of justice.This paperback edition comes at a time when Peter Ellis and the Christchurch Civic Cre`che case have returned to public attention. In July 2019, a terminally ill Ellis was granted a final appeal to the Supreme Court, scheduled for November 2019.

In this original second collection, Lynley Edmeades turns her attention to ideas of sound, listening and speech. Listening In is full of the verbal play and linguistic experimentation that characterised her first collection, but it also shows the poet pushing the form into new territories. Her poems show, often sardonically, how language can be undermined: linguistic registers are rife with uncertainties, ambiguities and accidental comedy. She shuffles and reshuffles statements and texts, and assumes multiple perspectives with the skill of a ventriloquist. These poems probe political rhetoric and linguistic slippages with a sceptical eye, and highlight the role of listening -- or the errors of listening -- in everyday communication.

The title of James Norcliffe's tenth poetry collection points deftly to the way it conveys big emotions without cracking a smile or shedding a tear. In Deadpan, Norcliffe writes in an alert, compassionate yet sceptical voice. The book's first section, 'Poor Yorick', shares the thoughts of an introspective narrator as he contends with the travails of later life. 'In his hospital pyjamas', Yorick is by turns cheerful and beset by loss, laughing and weeping, comparing the stages of life (and death). The following sections - 'Scan', 'Trumpet Vine', 'Telegraph Road' and 'Travellers in a small Ford' - reach around to mine experience in a world where 'nothing lasts'; not childhood, place nor identity. An appropriate response to this ephemeral world is to embrace ambiguity, uncertainty, absurdity and surrealism. 'Deadpan, ' writes the author in his introductory essay, 'is the porter in Macbeth pausing to take a piss while there is that urgent banging at the gate. It is Buster Keaton standing unmoved as the building crashes down on top of him. It is my poker-faced Yorkshire grandfather playing two little dicky birds sitting on the wall.' These poems are concise and contained, using supple, precise language and a gleam of dry and mordant wit. Deadpan is the work of a mature and technically astute poet who is one of New Zealand's leading writers.

Landfall is New Zealand's foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, as well as biographical and critical essays, and cultural commentary. Each issue brims with a mix of vital new work by this country's best writers. There are reviews of the latest books, art, film, drama and dance. Landfall is a high-quality production, with artist portfolios in full colour.

Landfall is New Zealand's foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, as well as biographical and critical essays, and cultural commentary. Featured artists: John Z Robinson, Justin Spiers, Susan Te Kahurangi King. Awards and competitions: Results and winning essays from the Landfall Essay Competition 2018, with judge's report by Emma Neale, and results from the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize 2018, with judge's report by David Eggleton. Writers: Philip Armstrong, Jane Arthur, Tusiata Avia, Antonia Bale, Tony Beyer, Victor Billot, Madeleine Child, Thom Conroy, Jodie Dalgleish, Doc Drumheller, Breton Dukes, Ciaran Fox, David Gregory, Michael Hall, René Harrison, Siobhan Harvey, Trevor Hayes, Kerry Hines, Joy Holley, Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod, Megan Kitching, Jessica Le Bas, Therese Lloyd, Jess MacKenzie, Frankie McMillan, Alice Miller, Michael Mintrom, Lissa Moore, James Norcliffe, Heidi North, Jilly O'Brien, Vincent O'Sullivan, Aiwa Pooamorn, John Prins, Lindsay Rabbitt, essa may ranapiri, Sudha Rao, Richard Reeve, Harry Ricketts, Alan Roddick, Derek Schulz, Di Starrenburg, Jillian Sullivan, John Summers, Jasmine Taylor, Angela Trolove, Iain Twiddy, Bryan Walpert, Susan Wardell, Rose Whitau, C.A.J. Williams, Briar Wood, Helen Yong

Bound together by myth and music, Michael Harlow's 'The Moon in a Bowl of Water' is a stunning new collection from a poet in complete control of his craft. Harlow is the maestro of the prose poem. Here he presents a collection of small human journeys, with a strong emphasis on narrative. The work is consciously rooted in Greek mythology and in the idea of storytelling as a continuous river, flowing from the ancients to the present, telling one story on the surface, but carrying in its depths the glints of ancient archetypes, symbols and myths. Each poem is studded with associations that hark back millennia. Harlow delights in the airiness of the imagination and the magic of transformation, especially through the power of language. Words become 'thought-birds' that can be caged, coaxed to sing, or allowed to fly, and the poems' sonic after-effects echo and re-echo in the reader's mind and ear.

In 1918, a miner on the run from the military wrote a letter to his sweetheart. Two months later he was in jail. Like millions of others, his letter had been steamed open by a team of censors shrouded in secrecy. Using their confiscated mail as a starting point, Dead Letters reveals the remarkable stories of people caught in the web of wartime surveillance. Among them were a feisty German-born socialist, an affectionate Irish nationalist, a love-struck miner, an aspiring Maxim Gorky, and two mystical dairy farmers with a poetic bent. Military censorship within New Zealand meant that their letters were stopped, confiscated, and filed away, sealed and unread for over 100 years. Until now.

Previous edition published as Wanaka: the Lake Wanaka region. 2002.

Born in 1949, Bluff-based Cilla McQueen is one of New Zealands best-loved poets. Poeta: Selected and New Poems brings together a definitive selection of her poetry spanning five decades, arranged by the poet in a thematic narrative that elucidates abiding themes while maintaining a loose chronology of her creative life to date.

"The poetry in David Eggletons new collection possesses an intensity and driven energy, using the poets recognisable signature oratory voice, strong in beat and measure, rooted in rich traditions of chant, lament and ode. Mashing together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating local vernaculars while simultaneously plugged in to a global zeitgeist of technobabble and fake news, Eggleton recycles and repurposes high visual culture and demotic aural culture. Edgeland offers a tragicomic and surreal skewering of the cons, swindles, posturings and flaws of damaged people on the make, dislocating the reader with high speed jinks and swerves. A satirical eye interrogates data, media bilge, opinion, social change, extreme experience, and worst case scenario extrapolations. A menagerie of vivid characters burst off the page including the man who mistook the moon for a candy bar, instigators, prestidigitators, procurators, promulgators, Zorro and Governor Grey alongside a survey of 35 types of beard, an ode to ooze, metadada, Gordon Ramsays pan-sizzled bulls pizzle, a Baxterian moa, and various other waka jumpers hailing from Jafaville to Jacks Blowhole. Edgeland is a dazzling display of polychromatic virtuosity, teeming with irrepressible wordplay, startling imagery and anarchic wit, from one of New Zealands best loved poets. Illustrations and cover art by New Zealand artist James Robinson."--Publisher information.

Landfall is New Zealand''s foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, as well as biographical and critical essays, and cultural commentary. Writers: Aimee-Jane Anderson-OConnor, Nick Ascroft, Joseph Barbon, Airini Beautrais, Tony Beyer, Mark Broatch, Danny Bultitude, Brent Cantwell, Rachel Connor, Ruth Corkill, Mark Edgecombe, Lynley Edmeades, Johanna Emeney, Bonnie Etherington, Jess Fiebig, Meagan France, Kim Fulton, Isabel Haarhaus, Bernadette Hall, Michael Hall, Rebecca Hawkes, Aaron Horrell, Jac Jenkins, Erik Kennedy, Brent Kininmont, Wen-Juenn Lee, Zoë Meager, Alice Miller, Dave Moore, Art Nahill, Janet Newman, Charles Olsen, Joanna Preston, Jessie Puru, Jeremy Roberts, Derek Schulz, Sarah Scott, Charlotte Simmonds, Tracey Slaughter, Elizabeth Smither, Rachael Taylor, Lynette Thorstensen, James Tremlett, Tam Vosper, Dunstan Ward, Susan Wardell, Sugar Magnolia Wilson.