Auckland University Press: 301 books

This pioneering examination of travel writing about New Zealand in the colonial period discusses a wide range of writing that helped place New Zealand on the literary map, while providing an oblique history of the young nation in the 19th century. Exploring early newspaper accounts; the journals of...

Divided into four distinct sections, this collection of poetry draws inspiration from the natural world while dissecting the concepts of loss, hesitancy, generation, and repetition. Exploring how everything may be turned into words, this intriguing anthology also demonstrates how those words themselves...

Bold and original, this collection is a genre-busting sequence of poetry and prose that confronts the place where mortality meets creativity. Using discontinuous narrative and alphabetical order, the author constructs a series of vignettes mixing biography, autobiography, arcane snippets of information,...

Every morning for the last thirty years, C. K. Stead has written fiction and poetry. Shelf Life collects the best of his afternoon work: reviews and essays, interviews and diaries, lectures and opinion pieces. In this latest collection, a sequel to the successful Answering to the Language, The Writer...

Language's classically menaced capacity to convey the realness of reality is the central anxiety of this inventive and sophisticated collection of poetry. As the poems ruminate on the humor and magic of everyday life and the severe melancholy of death, their expert handling of poetic diction, imagery,...

In 1984, on his way to a major exhibition opening, celebrated New Zealand painter Colin McCahon went missing for 24 hours in Sydney, Australia. He was discovered by police the next day on a bench in Centennial Park with no identification and suffering from amnesia; by all accounts, McCahon was never...

Our editors went out into New Zealand and rounded up a pile of blogs and travelogues, memoirs and journalism – some of the best true stories from the last year or so. We've got bullies and Barbie, chakra and shipwrecks, loose lips and AK47s. From Oamaru to Xinjiang to New York, Tell You What: 2016...

‘With the arrival of the second volume of Tell You What, the sum total of New Zealand non-fiction anthologies damn near doubles,' noted the Sunday Star-Times when they picked up last year's edition. Well, we thought, let's damn near triple it. Because we've discovered that New Zealanders love their...

Passport to Hell is the story of James Douglas Stark—“Starkie”—and his war. Journalist and novelist Robin Hyde came across Starkie while reporting in Mt Eden Gaol in the 1930s and immediately knew she had to write his “queer true terrible story.” Born in Southland and finding himself in...

Fizzing with wit and style and featuring original illustrations by the author, this lively, humorous, and tragic memoir traces the roots of a distinguished painter and her crucial role in New Zealand's feminist movement. Exploring the author's Irish ancestors; childhood in provincial Timaru, New Zealand;...

‘Us Maoris used to practice slavery just like them poor Negroes had to endure in America . . .' says Beth Heke in Once Were Warriors. ‘Oh those evil colonials who destroyed Maori culture by ending slavery and cannibalism while increasing the life expectancy,' wrote one sarcastic blogger. So was...

Keith Sinclair's The Origins of the Maori Wars is a fascinating account of the Waitara purchase and the cause of war in Taranaki in 1860. The seeds of conflict were sown in the earliest days of European settlement in New Zealand, when colonists arrived to take up land for which they had paid before...

When the New Zealand Supreme Court ruled on Wi Parata v the Bishop of Wellington in 1877, the judges infamously dismissed the relevance of the Treaty of Waitangi. During the past 25 years, judges, lawyers, and commentators have castigated this “simple nullity” view of the treaty. The infamous case...

This fifth collection of poems by a well-established poet is a vivid and compassionate evocation of ordinary domestic life. Unflinching realism about the situation of women gives her work power. Her handling of language, rhythm, and imagery is sophisticated and skilled. In this collection, the poet...