World Lit

Reclaiming Childhood: Nina Powles

Nina Powles is a young female poet from Wellington, New Zealand. Her first book of poetry, Girls of the Drift (Seraph Press 2014), was published while she was studying as an undergraduate at Victoria University. The following year, she completed an MA in creative writing at the IIML. Nina writes beautifully on women’s experiences in New Zealand, taking inspiration from historical figures—often, from the perspectives of people whose lives became, over time, anecdotal to others: to men, to buildings, to ghosts. She has already been recognized in the Best New Zealand Poems 2014 anthology, selected by Vincent O’Sullivan, and with the Biggs Prize for Poetry in 2015.

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Collecting the Fragments of a Young Poet: Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle grew up in Auckland with a sister, a father, and a Marguerite. Her debut collection, Autobiography of a Marguerite, is poetry and creative non-fiction at the same time. Her writing speaks openly on mental and physical illness, familial love and its discomforts, introversion, domesticity, and what it’s like being in her twenties in the 2010s.

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Self-Portraiture, However Slant: The Poetic Drive of Joan Fleming

Joan Fleming grew up in New Zealand and studied creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University, where she won the Biggs Prize in 2007. She has since relocated to Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Same as Yes (VUP 2011) and Failed Love Poems (VUP 2015). She edited the 2015 edition of Verge, Monash University’s creative writing annual, themed around Errance, the act of travelling from one place to another without any clear destination, or a wandering of the mind.

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The AR Reading List

An ongoing assortment of books by contributors, staff, and books we've featured in reviews.