WRITERS ON MONDAYS

WRITERS ON MONDAYS Recurring

The International Institute of Modern Letters presents

July–September 2025

MONDAYS 12.15–1.15 PM

Our annual series of events highlighting the very latest work of Aotearoa New Zealand writers is back. A lively and stimulating way to begin the week—and it’s free! See the bottom of the programme for venue information.

PROGRAMME 2025

7 JULY ON THE ROAD: GINA BUTSON AND MICHELLE RAHURAHU

You can run, but you can’t hide … or can you? In their exciting debut novels, International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) graduates Gina Butson and Michelle Rahurahu push their characters out into the world to find out. Rahurahu’s Poorhara sees cousins Star and Erin road-tripping in an unwarranted 1994 Daihatsu Mira; in The Stars Are a Million Glittering Worlds, Butson’s Thea traverses the globe, seeking and hiding from her own truths. Rahurahu won the Hubert Church Prize for Best First Book of Fiction at this year’s Ockham Book Awards. Butson won the 2024 Salient Creative Writing Competition. Chaired by Sue Orr.

14 JULY STORIES THAT DEFINE US: MICHELLE DUFF AND SARAID DE SILVA

Two writers exploring women’s lives across different landscapes and generations come together in this special event. Award-winning journalist Michelle Duff’s sharp, eclectic short story collection Surplus Women moves nimbly between realism and comic overdrive, meditating on power, patriarchy, and bad decisions. Saraid de Silva’s powerful debut novel, Amma, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, follows three women on different paths against shifting cultural backdrops in Singapore, New Zealand, and London. See these writers in conversation with Tina Makereti as they discuss the stories that define us.

21 JULY SAND AND SUGARCANE: NAFANUA PURCELL KERSEL AND MIKAELA NYMAN

The poems in Biggs Family Prize in Poetry winner Nafanua Purcell Kersel’s Black Sugarcane can sting and soothe, revealing a paradise despoiled by climate change and colonisation, and celebrating a people resilient in the face of it all. Mikaela Nyman is from the autonomous, demilitarised Åland Islands in Finland. Her first poetry collection in English, Anatomy of Sand, follows on from her climate fiction novel Sado. These two urgent contemporary voices join Tamara Tulitua in a conversation about rising seas, political and personal poetry, the local and global.

28 JULY MAKING AND MENDING: CADENCE CHUNG, GREGORY KAN, JIAQIAO LIU, AND NINA MINGYA POWLES

A poet’s toolbox is filled with techniques to help them kick-start or rebuild a poem, but sometimes the tried and true tricks aren’t enough. How can poets engage with other forms of art and artmaking to challenge and reinvent how poetry is written? New Zealand Poet Laureate Chris Tse talks with Cadence Chung (Mad Diva), Gregory Kan (Clay Eaters), Jiaqiao Liu (Dear Alter), and Nina Mingya Powles (In the Hollow of the Wave) about how their creative pursuits and interests outside poetry shape and inform their latest collections.

4 AUGUST DELIRIOUS: DAMIEN WILKINS

Winner of the prestigious Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, Damien Wilkins’s profoundly moving novel, Delirious, explores untimely loss, ageing, and surprise second chances. As well as being one of our most acclaimed novelists and Director of the IIML, Wilkins is a not-to-be-missed speaker. He appears in conversation with writer Emily Perkins to discuss the art of fiction, a career that spans 14 books, and where singing and songwriting fit into it all.

11 AUGUST HIGH TIDE: JENNIFER TREVELYAN AND JENNY PATTRICK

Seasoned Wellington writer Jenny Pattrick’s latest novel, Sea Change, digs into the developing tensions within a small Kāpiti Coast community forced to negotiate a managed retreat after a rupture in the Alpine fault generates a devastating tsunami. Tensions of a different kind propel debut author Jennifer Trevelyan’s A Beautiful Family. This suspenseful coming-of-age novel turns around a summer holiday on the coast and the search for a missing girl. Two authors at different stages of their careers discuss their work with Kate Duignan.

18 AUGUST ŌRONGOHAU | BEST NEW ZEALAND POEMS 2024

Join editor and poet Nick Ascroft as he introduces a crackling selection of New Zealand poets from his edition of the annual online anthology Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems. James Brown, Robin Peace, Simon Sweetman, Stacey Teague, Philomena Johnson, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Zephyr Zhang, and others will read their work, and poems by the late Fleur Adcock, Vincent O’Sullivan, and Paula Harris will also be celebrated in this warm-up to Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day.

25 AUGUST WRITING OFF THE MAP: ANNA JACKSON AND RACHEL O’NEILL

Nina Mingya Powles calls Anna Jackson’s Terrier, Worrier ‘a remarkable and playful book on language, anxiety, poetry, and the strangeness of being a person’. Somewhere between a diary and a collection of poetic essays, it takes Jackson’s work into previously uncharted territory. Equally off the charts is filmmaker, writer, and artist Rachel O’Neill’s Symphony of Queer Errands, a delightfully riotous musical fantasia and an irreverent ode to queer joy. Chris Price will pilot the conversation between these adventurous voyagers in unknown seas.

1 SEPTEMBER THE CONDITIONS OF RAPTURE: AMY MARGUERITE, SOPHIE VAN WAARDENBERG, AND EMMA BARNES

Three extraordinary poets introduce their new collections, books of poetry brimming over with feeling and taut with intellectual curiosity. Amy Marguerite (over under fed), Sophie van Waardenberg (No Good), and Emma Barnes (IF WE KNEW HOW TO WE WOULD) talk with Anna Jackson about the conditionality of rapture, the loveliness of loneliness, the difficulty of living in a hungry body, and how it has felt to keep writing through a pandemic, heartbreak and grief, and why it matters to make space for metaphor and memory, for sparrows and bees and a guinea-pig, eating a dandelion, its mouth full of gold.

8 SEPTEMBER THE SATIRE WE DESERVE: BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM AND DUNCAN SARKIES

Two novelists take the pulse of life in Aotearoa and diagnose a hilarious and dangerous arrhythmia. Brannavan Gnanalingam’s The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat takes the gloves off to better prod the weeping sores of our body politic and social media. Duncan Sarkies depicts the farcical and chilling demise of democracy within an alpaca breeders’ association in Stargazers. Join Pip Adam as she asks both writers about the serious intent behind the hijinks, and why it’s a good time to wield the satirical scalpel.

16 SEPTEMBER (TUESDAY) THE NEXT PAGE 1

6–7.30 pm at Meow

Grab a drink and settle in for a preview of the next generation of Aotearoa’s writers in this lively night of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from the IIML’s MA (Page) workshops, featuring Rachel Winter Hase, M. Paea, Anna Hoek-Sims, Kate Hall, Shinae Lawrence, Archana Patel, Lucy Croft, Trina Elkington-Ball, Mauatua Fa’ara-Reynolds, Eleanor Hayward, Blaze Thompson, Ada Duffy, Georgia Wearing, Madeline Enright, and Carrie Rudzinski.

17 SEPTEMBER (WEDNESDAY) THE NEXT PAGE 2

6–7.30 pm at Meow

The next new wave of words comes in with Simon Sweetman, Vicci Ho, Will Salmon, Ken Arkind, Te Ariki Wi Neera, Niamh Vaughan, Zoë Meager, Tasmin Pritchard, Stephen John Holgate, Margaret Mitchell, Isabella Smith, Helena Leon Mayer, Alexandra Stronach, Danielle Heyhoe, and Mitch Marks.

22 SEPTEMBER SHORT SHARP SCRIPT 1

Circa Theatre

Actors perform dynamic new work by MA Scriptwriting students from the IIML in this entertaining hour of theatre. This week, scripts by Alex Cherian, Chantal Euringer, Crosby Allen-Jennings, Eva Brunel, and Leroy Nurkka are introduced by Ken Duncum.

29 SEPTEMBER SHORT SHARP SCRIPT 2

Circa Theatre

Another fast, funny, and furious set of scripts from the IIML’s scriptwriting students. This week the spotlight falls on work by Iris Mackenzie, Hazel Perigo-Blackburn, Megan Connolly, Sonja Cooke, and Victoria Lewis, introduced by Ken Duncum.

VENUE INFORMATION

Events run on Mondays from 12.15 to 1.15 pm at Rongomaraeroa (Te Marae), Level 4, Te Papa Tongarewa, except for:

The Next Page 1 and 2: Meow (9 Edward Street), Tuesday 16 and Wednesday 17 September, 6–7.30 pm
Short Sharp Script 1 and 2: Circa Theatre, Monday 22 and 29 September, 12.15–1.15 pm

ADMISSION IS FREE—ALL WELCOME

Writers on Mondays is presented with the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Circa Theatre, Meow and Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day

Supported by the Letteri Family