Otago University Press

11/07/2025

We're over the moon to see Philip Armstrong's new collection Touch Screen on this year's bestseller chart 🥳🥳 Congratulations, Philip!!

You can also read a poem from the collection on Newsroom ✨

Read here: https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/07/11/this-weeks-bestsellers-july-11/

10/07/2025

Superstar poet Cadence Chung made her Wairarapa Word debut over the weekend with the wonderful Wairarapa Word ✨ Here are some photos from the event 💕

08/07/2025

A huge congratulations to Robyn Maree Pickens, who has been awarded the 2025 Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the English Department - University of Canterbury. From July this year until early 2026, Robyn will be working on an ecopoetics manuscript related to the Hinewai Reserve on Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū Banks Peninsula. Robyn’s debut collection, Tung, came out in 2023 and was the Laurel Prize 2024 third place winner 🌿

04/07/2025

Last night we came together to celebrate the launch of Philip Armstrong’s new poetry collection, Touch Screen 🐍

We had fantastic company, amazing kai from Portershed Cafe and the incredible Scorpio Books as our hosts 💚A massive thank you to Scorpio Books, Claudia Herz Jardine and everyone who came to help us celebrate! Thank you also to Anna Smith and Siobhan Collins for launching Philip’s book for us!

Touch Screen is out now! 🐍
oup.nz/touch-screen

03/07/2025

'Mad Diva is a love letter to poetry ... For those who are yet to discover Cadence Chung, they will find Mad Diva is a gateway that paints some of the most vivid pictures of life ever penned.'

A glowing review of Mad Diva by Cadence Chung from Hamesh Wyatt for the Otago Daily Times ✨

https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/otago-daily-times/20250628/283055535401094

03/07/2025

'Chung, who is in her final year of studying at the New Zealand School of Music, said she was fascinated by “evil women” in opera. Several such dramatic divas are portrayed in her book — such as Carmen and Salome, from the eponymous operas by Georges Bizet and Richard Strauss respectively.

She said opera’s older canons have constructed certain ideas around women’s desires being immoral.

“When, in fact, I think a lot of these characters are just really interesting, and I wish we got to know more of them beyond them just being framed as wrong."'

A conversation between Cadence Chung and Federico Magrin for the Wairarapa Times-Age Midweek (The Post Stuff) ahead of Cadence's Wairarapa debut this weekend with Wairarapa Word

Cadence Chung will be singing pieces connected to her new book Mad Diva and reading poems at a koha-entry event on July 6.

25/06/2025

Happy publication day to Touch Screen, the incredible new poetry collection by Philip Armstrong 🐍🧡

The word ‘touchscreen’ entered the English language in the early 1970s to describe a computer display screen that also functions as an input device operated by touching its surface. In this absorbing collection, Touch Screen, poet Philip Armstrong dismantles this now ubiquitous term and helps us see its component parts afresh – ‘touch’ and ‘screen’ strangely reconfigured in today’s complex technological world.

In poems that range from the personal lyric to retellings of myths and stories long held in the human imagination, Armstrong explores the rapidly evolving interface between human and non-human worlds. Touch Screen brings us face to face with being alive here and now, and asks the urgent question: Can you feel it?

Out now! Find in your local bookstore
Or online at oup.nz/touch-screen

And join us next week at to launch this wonderful new collection 🧡💚 Event page: https://www.facebook.com/share/12MaWAbRiVB/