Landfall — Current Issue

Landfall 218

Islands

Guest edited by David Eggleton

Published November 2009

This issue of Landfall, edited by David Eggleton, is bursting at the seams with good things to read. It announces and publishes the winning essays in the Landfall Essay Competition 2009, it announces
the winner of New Zealand’s richest poetry prize – the Kathleen
Grattan Award 2009, and there is a special feature celebrating the
centenary of founding editor Charles Brasch’s birth.

Most of the content – which ranges from new poetry through short
fiction, commentary, reviews and artworks by Andy Leleisi’uao, Gregory O’Brien and Ben Webb – explores our hybrid culture and how it is expressed by our writers. There are established contributors here, with the issue opening with Robert Sullivan’s ‘Maui’s Alternate Prayer’, and a scattering of newer voices including Leilani Burgoyne and Vaughan Rapatahana. Laurence Simmons’ ‘The Sea of Islands: Rethinking Eurocentrism in the Wake of the Oceanic’ and Jacky
Bowring’s ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Four Meditations on Landscape and Melancholy’ provide substantial reading to reflect on.

The winner of the Landfall Essay Competition is Ashleigh Young of Wellington. David Eggleton judged
the competition and observes that her essay is an ‘heroic consideration of the inner primitive’. Runner-up was John Newton, who ‘corrals, ties up and brands that devilishly complex and twitching term Pakeha’.

Founding editor of Landfall Charles Brasch is celebrated, with recollections from a number of writers,
including Peter Entwisle, Alan Rodddick, Margaret Scott and Sue Wootton, and a poem by Janet Frame.

Finally, the winner of The Kathleen Grattan Award. This is an award for an original collection of poems or long poem by a New Zealand or Pacific resident or citizen. The winner receives a prize of $16,00 and will be published by Otago University Press in 2010. The winning manuscript is ‘Stunning Debut of the Repairing of a Life’, by Leigh Davis of Auckland. Sadly, Leigh died in October. The manuscript was written during and after a course of radiotherapy and chemotherapy for a brain tumour. Judge Ian Wedde comments in his judge’s report that in making his decision he was looking for ‘that hard-to-define thrill of imaginative and intellectual confi dence that held my attention, astonished me, and made me turn the pages’.

Editor

David Eggleton is a performance poet and writer. Part Polynesian, he grew up between Fiji and New Zealand. Eggleton’s many awards include six times Book Reviewer of the Year in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, PEN Best First Book of Poetry, the Robert Burns Fellowship and, uniquely among New Zealand poets, he was London Time Out’s Street Entertainer of the Year in 1985. He also writes non-fiction, has produced several documentaries, CDs and short films.

ISBN 978 1 877372 97 1, 208 pages (8 in colour), $29.95