Te Atea: ko tenei te wa: Kristin Smith
Ko tēnei Te Wiki o te Reo Māori! Today we have a love letter to Te Ātea, a futuristic Young Adult story about a nuclear holocaust and space travel, all in te reo Māori, by the acclaimed author Dame Katerina…
New Zealand
The Magic of Translation: Nadine Anne Hura
Ko tēnei Te Wiki o te Reo Māori! All week, our guest editor Nadine Anne Hura (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi) will bring us literary insights and treasures from Te Ao Māori. First up, she draws back the curtain on the production…
Hooked on NZ Books: Eirlys Hunter on YA
New Zealand Young Adult fiction is as good as any in the world. So why doesn’t it have a higher profile with young readers in Aotearoa, and what can be done about that? Writer, reviewer and teacher Eirlys Hunter tells…
The great Wardini, debut steampunk novelist
Earlier this month, we treated you to an excerpt from Gareth Ward’s award-winning debut steampunk adventure novel, The Traitor and the Thief. Here’s an interview with the fascinating, hardworking author himself. Your bio notes read like an adventure novel of…
Four new international non-fiction books
Mary Wadsworth, co-owner of the Dorothy Butler Children’s Bookshop in Auckland, reviews four recent non-fiction titles by international authors – Finding Gobi: The True Story of One Little Dog’s Big Journey, about an extreme athlete’s quest to find a dog…
The Sampling: The Traitor and the Thief
An excerpt from Gareth Ward’s debut steampunk adventure novel and winner of the 2016 Storylines Tessa Duder Award, The Traitor and the Thief. Orphan, urchin and thief, Sin, has just been chased through the streets of Coxford by a sinister old man, Eldritch … Secrets, spies and steampunk gadgets abound in this fantastic adventure story!
Words/pictures: a review of graphic novel, Moa
Mitch Marks reviews Moa, a collection of comics by James Davidson (published by Earth’s End), and makes a case for the importance of graphic novels in general. It’s well documented, and kind of a no-brainer, that combining words and pictures…
TEENAGE WITCH: growing up with Hermione
For International Women’s Day, an essay by Nina Powles about Hermione Granger, feminism and searching for yourself in books. My room at the house near the beach was small and blue. It was empty except for a fold-out bed and…
In the Stacks: a love letter to public libraries
Kate De Goldi confesses the pleasures of reading ‘off-task and off-curriculum’, and describes how necessary public libraries are to the development of a love of reading. In my late teens and early twenties I worked as a library assistant in…
Promised Land: a fairy tale for everyone
First-time authors Chaz Harris and Adam Reynolds have been all over the international media lately, thanks to the success of their self-published, crowdfunded picture book, Promised Land. It’s a fairy tale about ‘friendship, responsibility, adventure and love’ which just happens…