Talia Marshall's debut book Whaea Blue (2024) is a force of nature. Abandoning neutral expressions of praise, New Zealand's reviewers have spoken of it in tones of dazed warning: the book is 'stunning', 'haunted', and 'alarming in its honesty'. But while it has its wild moments, it also has notes of humour and gentleness, 'whaea' means mother or aunty...
Historians will look back at 2020 with the same fascination as arborists looking at one of those tree-ring anomalies that signal something cataclysmic—a wildfire,...
The necessity of 'staying safe at home' has changed things. Even I, one of the least social people outside of cave-dwelling hermits, have occasionally...
Lately I've been wrestling a ferocious shape-shifting beast of immense proportions that breathes fire, spits venom in my eyes and generally makes a nuisance...
The House of Atreus is cursed. I have been making my way through Louis MacNeice's 1939 translation of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, which is sometimes tough...
