Otago University Press

05/11/2025

'The concept of ‘untruths’ is, after all, monstrous and knotty, and lies and deceptions rest on the slipperiness of language - where better than poetry to explore? The poems in Liar, Liar inhabit a vast spectrum of human duplicity and associated implications and moral conundrums: scepticism, mistrust, abuses of power, powerlessness, disillusionment, secrets, self-deceptions… I see it as a collection about how truths may be dissembled, concocted, ineffable, remote. What pervades the collection most conspicuously, in my view, is an aching sense of what’s missing and unpinnable, of loss.' – Grace Yee

'From my perspective, there isn’t one way to approach Liar, Liar, though its potency increases with each revisit, so additional read-throughs are a must. Perhaps part of its merit lies within the breadth of perspectives and the number of times they left me provoked and pondering.' – Solli Raphael

Read this amazing kōrero between Grace Yee and Solli Raphael about Emma Neale's collection Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit - made possible by the City of Literature Dunedin, New Zealand ✨

Grace Yee & Solli Raphael on Emma Neale’s Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit (Otago University Press)

03/11/2025

'I love a book with an interesting form, and this one ticked all the boxes. I read Hiding Places in two sittings over one rainy Wellington Sunday, compelled by its bite-sized digressions, stories, extracts and observations.

‘It’s not what she says but how she says it that reveals what hides beneath,’ the narrator says, and ‘how she says it’ forms the basis of this book. Woven through with ‘stories’, as well as excerpts from a 1913 childcare manual, found poems, responses to other texts and the lovely letters to ‘K’, this hybrid text creates a real/not-real, me/not me structure of suggestion and reference – a way of talking about what matters to us most, but telling it slant. And the result is rich, complex, skittish and intelligent.'

Sarah Scott reviews Hiding Places by Lynley Edmeades for Kete Books ✨

'...a way of talking about what matters to us most, but telling it slant. And the result is rich, complex, skittish and intelligent...'...

31/10/2025

Interested in working in the publishing industry? Look no further than the Whitireia Publishing course! Enrolment for 2026 is open now! 😍✨📚

Find out more here: https://www.whitireiaweltec.ac.nz/study-programmes/creativity/creative-writing-and-publishing/graduate-diploma-in-publishing-applied

30/10/2025

Some photos from an incredible weekend at the 2025 😍 This year’s theme was Ahi Kā, keeping the home fires burning 🔥 Each session felt ablaze with words and experiences and connection - it was an inspiring weekend, so full of warmth and so distinctly Ōtepoti Dunedin 🩵 thank you for having us and our authors!!

30/10/2025

A great review of Strong Words 4 edited by Lynley Edmeades on Kete Books! Thank you to Becs Tetley for this review! ✨

Becs Tetley takes a long look at STRONG WORDS 4, a collection of twenty essays selected by editor Lynley Edmeades from the Landfall 2023 and 2024 essay competitions. ...

29/10/2025

'Lyrical in its use of imagery, the prose is vivid and idiosyncratic. Some readers may find Hyde’s descriptive richness challenging, but her language is part of what makes the book endure. She paints landscapes and emotions with a poet’s precision, evoking Auckland’s harbours, sand dunes, and streets with rare intensity. The result is a narrative that feels local and, at the same time, universal. In the end, Wednesday’s Children stands as a profoundly humane work - an exploration of freedom and identity that continues to speak to modern readers.'

Chris Reed reviews Wednesday's Children by Robin Hyde for NZ Booklovers ✨ https://www.nzbooklovers.co.nz/post/wednesday-s-children-by-robin-hyde?

First published in 1937, Wednesday’s Children remains one of Robin Hyde’s most original and affecting works. Its reissue is both a celebration and a reminder of Hyde’s literary courage, as she explores questions of freedom, creativity, and belonging through a narrative that is at once dreamlik...

23/10/2025

Two lovely reviews by Mark Broatch in this week's New Zealand Listener ✨ One for Ruth Dallas: A writer's life by Diana Morrow and one for This Moment, Every Moment: Ruth Dallas Collected Poems edited by Nicola Cummins

23/10/2025

"She was somebody who was quite independently minded, so she knew the way she wanted to live her life. She was quite strong willed, and for example when she went to school and was being told what to think and how to think, she was quite resentful. She was somebody who had to find her own way.” – Diana Morrow

“She is a very astute and careful observer of the natural environment around her.” – Nicola Cummins

Federico Magrin writes about Ruth Dallas for Stuff. Here he interviews Diana Morrow about her new biography about Ruth, 'Ruth Dallas: A writer's life', and Nicola Cummins about the new edition of Ruth's collected poems, This Moment, Every Moment: Ruth Dallas Collected Poems – out today! ✨

Two new books shed light on previously unreported sides of her life and poetry.

22/10/2025

Happy publication day to This Moment, Every Moment: Ruth Dallas Collected Poems by Ruth Dallas, edited by Nicola Cummins 🌿

This Moment, Every Moment is a new and updated edition of the collected poems of internationally renowned Aotearoa New Zealand poet Ruth Dallas. Edited and introduced by Nicola Cummins, and with cover art by Kushana Bush, this volume brings together previously uncollected poems written in Dallas’s youth, alongside all her published collections – from her arrival in 1953 as a significant voice in the New Zealand literary landscape with Country Road and Other Poems, 1947-52, to her final book, The Joy of a Ming Vase, published in 2006.

Ruth Dallas’s voice is unique within the Aotearoa New Zealand literary canon. Her poetry is characterised by a profound connection to nature and seasonal rhythms. It is deeply grounded in place – often to locations in Otago and Southland, where she spent most of her life – yet universal in its reach. The clarity, elegance and apparent simplicity of her style owe much to her interest in classical Chinese poetry and thought.

This Moment, Every Moment demonstrates the majesty of Dallas’s craft across her lifetime of poetic work. Time spent in contemplation of even a single Dallas poem is always time richly rewarded; how much more so with this complete collection.

Out now!
Find in your local bookstore 📚
oup.nz/this-moment-every-moment

22/10/2025

Happy publication day to Ruth Dallas: A writer’s life, a stunning new biography by Diana Morrow ✨

Ruth Dallas (1919–2008) is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most respected and influential literary voices. Yet despite her international success and her enduring presence as one of the country’s most anthologised poets, the full extent of her contribution to New Zealand literature has been relatively unexamined and under-appreciated. Now Diana Morrow’s comprehensive biography, Ruth Dallas: A writer’s life, redresses this imbalance, and gives this outwardly reserved South Islander her overdue place in the spotlight as a significant poet, fiction writer and children’s author.

Ruth Dallas: A writer’s life illuminates Dallas’s personal and professional relationships, describes major formative episodes in her life – including the traumatic loss of an eye as a teenager – and investigates her inspirations and creative process. Morrow brilliantly captures the inter-regional jousting of the post-war New Zealand literary scene, and Dallas’s independent-minded and highly respected presence within it. An early and regular contributor to Landfall, Dallas became both a friend and a trusted literary advisor to the journal’s founding editor, Charles Brasch, working for a time as Landfall’s ‘secretary’ – a role perhaps more justly described as co-editor. As well as Brasch, Dallas’s circle of friends and colleagues included James K. Baxter, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Roderick Finlayson, Janet Frame and Basil Dowling.

Out now!
Find in your local bookstore 📚
More info at oup.nz/ruth-dallas

22/10/2025

"The strands of this compilation are interwoven and ever-changing, so I found my mind constantly turning in a new direction. Each page/entry brought a different response: I was by turns empathetic, amused, shocked, curious and sometimes confused and unsure of what to think. Reading through, I was fueled with anticipation, looking for connections and developments. Looking back on the thread that related most to my own experiences, I found the rawness and the unflinching accounts of the psychological and physical load of being a new mother particularly resonated."

"I was drawn in by the intense, fragmented writing as the author looked for meaning in "hidden places" and found myself returning again and again to re-read, like the writer, to the story, “the place where hovering happens.”

Clare Lyon reviews Hiding Places by Lynley Edmeades for NZ Booklovers ✨

https://www.nzbooklovers.co.nz/post/hiding-places-by-lynley-edmeades?

Lynley Edmeades is the current editor of the literary journal Landfall, an academic teaching English and creative writing at Otago University and the author of three poetry collections. From her writing here, we also see her experience of motherhood.This volume aroused curiosity from the moment I pi...

21/10/2025

Some beautiful photos from the launch of Landfall Tauraka 250 and the opening of the Special Collections, University of Otago Library Landfall Tauraka exhibition ✨