Te Awa o Kupu
Editors:
Vaughan Rapatahana & Kiri Piahana-Wong
Publisher:
Penguin
ISBN:
9780143777953
Date published:
29 August 2023
Pages:
416
Format:
Paperback
RRP:
$37.00
A stunning new collection of poetry and stories by contemporary Māori writers.
More than 80 contemporary Māori writers explore a vast array of issues that challenge, stimulate and intrigue. With originality and insight, these poems and short stories express compassion, concern, curiosity, suffering and joy.
Te Awa o Kupu is a companion volume to Ngā Kupu Wero, which focuses on recent non-fiction. Together these two passionate and vibrant anthologies reveal that the irrepressible river of words flowing from Māori writers today shows us who and what we are.
About the Editors
Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa) commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines, and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genre in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, Spanish. He earned a Ph.D from the University of Auckland with a thesis about Colin Wilson and writes extensively about Wilson. Rapatahana is a critic of the agencies of English language proliferation and the consequent decimation of indigenous tongues, inaugurating and co-editing English language as Hydra and Why English? Confronting the Hydra (Multilingual Matters, Bristol, UK, 2012 and 2016).
He is also a poet, with nine collections published in Hong Kong SAR; Macau; Philippines; USA; England; France, India, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Atonement (UST Press, Manila) was nominated for a National Book Award in Philippines (2016); he won the inaugural Proverse Poetry Prize the same year; and was included in Best New Zealand Poems (2017). In July 2018, he participated in the Hauterives Literary Festival in France. In September 2019, he participated in the World Poetry Recital Night, in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia. In October 2019, he participated in the Poetry International Festival at The Southbank Centre, London. He also appeared at the Medellin Poetry Festival in Colombia during August 2021. Rapatahana is one of the few World authors who consistently writes in and is published in te reo Māori. It is his mission to continue to do so and to push for a far wider recognition of the need to write and to be published in this tongue.
