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Bob Crowder book cover.

Bob Crowder: A New Zealand organics pioneer

By Matt Morris

Bob Crowder: A New Zealand organics pioneer tells the story of Bob Crowder, a leading horticulturist and early champion of regenerative agriculture in Aotearoa New Zealand. Crowder played a pivotal role in the birth of the organics movement in New Zealand, establishing the country’s only university-based organics research unit in the early 1960s and helping to build a sector now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

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Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Māori

By James Herries Beattie, edited by Atholl Anderson

Traditional Lifeways of the Southern Māori was the major field project undertaken by journalist James Herries Beattie for the Otago Museum in 1920. For twelve months, he interviewed people from Foveaux Strait to North Canterbury, and from Nelson and Westland. He also visited libraries to check information compiled by earlier researchers, spent time with Māori in Otago Museum recording southern names for fauna and artefacts, visited pā sites, and copied notebooks lent to him by informants. His work was later produced into a manuscript for the Hocken Collections, and then edited into a book by Professor Athol Anderson. With a striking new cover, this new edition of an essential resource continues to impart it’s knowledge of historical lifestyles and customs of Te Waipounamu.

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Landfall 246 cover. A woman with long brown hair and cornflower flowers

Landfall 246

Edited by Lynley Edmeades

Edited by Lynley Edmeades Announces the winner of the 2023 Landfall Essay Competition, Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award and 2023 Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize Aotearoa’s longest-running arts and literary journal Showcases exciting new contemporary art and writing Paperback, 230 x 150mm, 208pp ISBN 9781990048647, RRP $30 Release date: 27 November 2023

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Artwork and book title

History of New Zealand and its Inhabitants

By Dom Felice Vaggioli and translated by John Crockett

A new edition of a rare and sought-after book. History of New Zealand and its Inhabitants is the English translation of Italian monk Dom Felice Vaggioli’s radical, prescient appraisal of British colonisation in Aotearoa. Vaggioli was one of the first Benedictine priests to be sent to Aotearoa NZ, and while working in Auckland, the Coromandel and Gisborne during the years 1879–1887, he observed lifestyles and customs and gathered information about the country’s history, including first-hand accounts of the signing of Te Tiriti and the conflicts in Taranaki and Waikato. The Italian version of his book about Aotearoa was destroyed in Europe due to its anti-Protestant and anti-British views but was later discovered and translated into English in Aotearoa by John Crockett in 2000. This 2023 edition brings Vaggioli’s unique document into the public eye once more.

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Book cover depicting photo of Robert Lord sitting in a deck chair next to his dog.

Robert Lord Diaries

Edited by Chris Brickell, Vanessa Manhire and Nonnita Rees

Robert Lord (1945–1992) is an important figure in the history of literature and theatre in Aotearoa New Zealand. Co-founder of Playmarket and author of Well Hung, Bert and Maisy and Joyful and Triumphant, Robert Lord wrote incisive and often satiric radio and stage plays, experimenting with traditional theatre forms and incorporating queer characters at a time when almost nobody else did. His diaries, which record his life from 1974, when he first moved to New York, until his death in Dunedin in 1992, capture the highs and lows of his writing practice, the theatre world and his social life. Revealing the dramatic contrast between life as a gay man in 1970s and 80s New York – a world of sex, drugs and socialising – and provincial New Zealand, with its respectable living rooms, fields of carrots and the occasional homoerotic demonstration of sheep shearing, his diary entries tell of torn loyalties and reveal the intense creative momentum Lord forged from his dislocated, outsider status.

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Yellow image vaguely resembling a watercolour of a landscape painting in dominant yellow.

When I Reach for Your Pulse

by Rushi Vyas

In this electrifying debut, Rushi Vyas untangles slippery personal and political histories in the wake of a parent’s suicide. In this tough and tender, gently powerful collection, grief returns us to elemental silence. This language listens as much as it sings, asking if it is possible to recover from the muting effects of British colonialism, American imperialism, patriarchy and caste hierarchies. Which cultural legacies do we release in order to heal? Which do we keep alive, and which keep us alive?

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Tung cover image: textured oil painting in mint and white, oval in shape that resembles a open mouth.

Tung

by Robyn Maree Pickens

Tung is the keenly anticipated debut collection from award-winning Ōtepoti-Dunedin poet, Robyn Maree Pickens. Pickens is an eco-pioneer of words, attuned to the fine murmurings of the earth and to the louder sound and content of human languages (English, Spanish, Japanese and Finnish). These poems offer sustenance and repair to a planet in the grips of a socio-ecological crisis.

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Strong Words 3 image artistically dipicting several sections of text focussed on central point.

Strong Words 3

Selected by Emma Neale and Lynley Edmeades

Strong Words 3 showcases the best of the best of Aotearoa New Zealand’s contemporary essays from 2021 and 2022, selected from entries into the Landfall Essay Competition. Strong Words 3 is packed with Aotearoa New Zealand’s most compelling new writing on contemporary issues, tackling topics such as grief, lost language, poetic childhood recollections, gender, the long aftermath of colonisation, the nature of traumatic memory, and working as a comedian while solo parenting.

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Kitching cover website

At the Point of Seeing

By Megan Kitching

At the Point of Seeing is the extraordinary debut collection from Ōtepoti Dunedin poet Megan Kitching. Poised, richly observant and deftly turned, Kitching’s poems bestow a unique attention upon the world, especially to those weedy, overgrown and pest-infested places where the human impulse to name, control and colonise meet nature’s life force and wild exuberance. These compelling poems urge the reader to slow down and give space to the living, moving, breathing environment that surrounds them.

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LF 245 cover website

Landfall 245: Autumn 2023

Edited by Lynley Edmeades

Landfall is Aotearoa’s foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. Each volume showcases two full-colour art portfolios and brims with vital new fiction, poetry, cultural commentary, reviews, and biographical and critical essays. Landfall 245, Autumn 2023 edition, announces the winner of the 2023 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition and features exciting new literature and art.

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KM’s Europe cover website

Katherine Mansfield's Europe

Station to Station

By Redmer Yska

Beautifully written and illustrated with maps and stunning photography, Katherine Mansfield’s Europe is part travelogue, part literary biography, part detective story and part ghost story. Guided by Mansfield’s journals and letters, author Redmer Yska pursues the traces of her restless journeying in Europe, seeking out the places where she lived, worked and – a century ago this year – died.

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Afermaths cover website

Aftermaths

Colonialism, Violence and Memory in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific

Edited by Angela Wanhalla, Lyndall Ryan and Camille Nurka

Aftermaths explores the life-changing intergenerational effects of colonial violence in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific. Ranging from Ōrākau pā in the Waikato to the Kimberleys in northwest Australia, from orphanages in Fiji to the ancestral lands of the Wiyot Tribe in Northern California, this collection of illustrated essays reveals the living legacy of historical events, showing how they have been remembered (and misremembered) within families and communities into the present day.

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Bridge Deep Colour website

Deep Colour

by Diana Bridge

Deep Colour, by acclaimed poet Diana Bridge, is a fiercely sensory and meticulously crafted collection. These prismatic poems, including some exquisite English translations of fifth-century classical Chinese poetry, respond with graceful precision to the immediate physical world, and meditate on time, beauty and the nature of being.

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Respirator Cover Website

Respirator

A Poet Laureate Collection 2019–2022

by David Eggleton

Respirator is a sumptuous celebration of David Eggleton’s tenure as the nation’s poet-at-large during his time as Aotearoa NZ Poet Laureate (2019–22). In this collection of probing, kaleidoscopic and richly sensuous poems, Eggleton explores how the social changes and upheavals of the past four extraordinary years manifested in Aotearoa New Zealand, from the impact of living through a pandemic to ecological concerns, technological changes, and shifting viewpoints about identity and global consumerism.

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Histories of Hate website

Histories of Hate

The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand

Edited by Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij and Paul Spoonley

Histories of Hate explores radical intolerance and extremism in Aotearoa New Zealand, bringing together a wealth of historians, sociologists, political scientists, kaupapa Māori scholars, and experts in religious and media studies to explore the origins of the New Zealand radical right in the late nineteenth century to the present day.

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LtO Norcliffe website

Letter to 'Oumuamua

James Norcliffe

In Letter to ‘Oumuamua, James Norcliffe applies a cool, clear eye to human life on Earth and makes succinct observations that traverse the personal and political. Grounded in the local but encompassing the global, they range through subjects such as commuting, insomnia and faltering health to the contemplation of current events and issues such as gun violence and climate change.

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Frances Edmond cover website

Always Going Home

Lauris and Frances Edmond: A mother and daughter story

Frances Edmond

Always Going Home is the compelling personal story of Frances Edmond’s relationship with her ‘beloved, complicated, difficult’ mother, the award-winning poet Lauris Edmond (1924–2000). Told through memories, family recollections, and the ‘goldmine’ of Lauris’s correspondence and diaries, Frances takes a more intimate look at areas of Lauris’s private life than have been detailed in previous family histories and autobiographies.

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LANDFALL 244 cover website

Landfall 244: Spring 2022

Edited by Lynley Edmeades

Landfall is New Zealand’s foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. Published twice a year, each volume showcases two full-colour art portfolios and brims with vital new fiction, poetry, cultural commentary, reviews, and biographical and critical essays. In the 2022 Spring edition, Landfall 244, Lynley Edmeades brings together a range of voices and perspectives, from established practitioners to emerging voices.

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O me voy o te vas website

O me voy o te vas / One of us must go

Rogelio Guedea with translations by Roger Hickin

In O me voy o te vas / One of us must go, love is a powerful magnet that attracts and repels in equal measure. In this lyrical collection, Rogelio Guedea (with English translations by Roger Hickin) examines what it means to share one’s life with another person and questions whether – and how – love can survive reality’s steady tap-drip repetitions.

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Lee Foulden Maar website

Fossil Treasures of Foulden Maar

A window into Miocene Zealandia

Daphne Lee, Uwe Kaulfuss and John Conran

In Fossil Treasures of Foulden Maar, authors Daphne Lee, Uwe Kaulfuss and John Conran share their passion and knowledge for Foulden Maar in Otago, New Zealand, a paleontological site of international significance and home to countless rare, well-preserved fossils. This beautifully illustrated book reveals the unique paleontological discoveries that have been made to-date, taking a snapshot of changing life and ecosystems at the beginning of the Miocene and paying tribute to the scientific researchers who have helped bring Foulden Maar’s scientific marvels to the surface.

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Morton Beast cover website

Naming the Beasts

Elizabeth Morton

Naming the Beasts is a menagerie of poems about the gnarlier aspects of being a creature of this world. Hoof and hide, fang and gut, these images and insights are those of an artist in a war zone intent on chronicling beauty in a world that’s falling apart. Morton’s poems take a bite out of the world around us, as they explore reality through the vitality and immersiveness of their imaginative powers.

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Notes on womanhood website

Notes on Womanhood

Sarah Jane Barnett

After Sarah Jane Barnett had a hysterectomy in her forties, a comment by her doctor that she wouldn’t be “less of a woman” prompted her to investigate what the concept of womanhood meant to her. Part memoir, part feminist manifesto, part coming-of-middle-age story, Notes on Womanhood is the result.

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Wood NZ Nurses website

New Zealand Nurses

Caring for our people 1880–1950

Pamela Wood

Author Pamela Wood’s New Zealand Nurses draws on a wealth of nurses’ personal stories to identify the values, traditions, community and folklore of the nursing culture from 1880 – when hospital reforms began to formally introduce ‘modern nursing’ into New Zealand – to 1950, three years after New Zealand severed its final tie as part of the British Empire.

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LANDFALL 243 website

Landfall 243: Autumn 2022

Lynley Edmeades (ed)

Announcing the winner of the 2022 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition. Exciting contemporary art and writing

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Steven Night School cover website

Night School

Michael Steven

Winner of the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award 2021, poet Michael Steven’s Night School explores the gap between fathers and sons, the effects of toxic masculinity, how power corrupts and corrodes, and whether weed, art and aroha can save us in a godless world.

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Charman Pistils website

The Pistils

Janet Charman

The Pistils is a dispatch from the cusp of change. It appears at the severing of a 40-year relationship following the illness and death of poet Janet Charman’s partner during the Covid restrictions.

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Anzac Nations cover

Anzac Nations

The legacy of Gallipoli in New Zealand and Australia, 1965–2015

Rowan Light

In Anzac Nations: The legacy of Gallipoli in New Zealand and Australia, 1965–2015, author Rowan Light examines the myth-making around Anzac and how commemoration has evolved.

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