'It’s a dream job' : Zech Soakai, guest Pasifika curator at Auckland Writers Festival

Zech Soakai (Poutasi, Upolu, Samoa / Pangai, Ha’apai, Tonga) is a proud tusitala, kaiako, village builder and warrior raiser with ten years’ experience accumulated in the classrooms of South Auckland as a facilitator, educator and more recently Kaiārahi (Dean). He is also a spoken word poet and interdisciplinary artist who, since leaving the classroom full-time, is now broadly entrenched in the work of social change through storytelling. 

After a busy 2025 where he released his debut solo book For All We Know, travelled as a poet to the UBud Writers’ Festival 2025, produced a sell-out season for Tongan theatre show Fā’onelua ‘O Manako Polohiva, and was writer in residence at Tala Jar’s Fafagu Measina: A Residency for Storytellers in Samoa, Zech feels privileged to return as a guest curator for Auckland Writers Festival 2026.

And at Kete, we’re excited to hear all about it. 

Bula Zech, thank you for speaking to Kete. Can you tell us about your guest curatorship at the Auckland Writers Festival? It seems like quite a responsibility.

Thanks so much for having me. It is both a responsibility but also a greater privilege x2 when you get to build your understanding of this specialist role over more than one festival / programme — so shout out to Lyndsey and her team for graciously having me back.

But yeah, the guest curator role in my mind requires having your own curatorial vision as a guest curator and working with the AWF team to weave that vision into the wider festival programme. It’s a dream job to be given the keys and say the sky's the limit. And truly, the sky is the limit — this is my second year guest curating for AWF and I’ve been interested in bringing my Pacific communities with me. That hasn’t changed, and in fact I feel like the second time around I have even greater clarity about how to honour my communities, weave in some of our beautiful writers and also provide our faithful AWF audience with events that they will appreciate.

But in terms of the nuts and bolts of the role — the guest curator comes on in the last quarter of the year prior to the Festival in May. We are tasked to dream up 3 - 4 events and what writers and literary figures we would like to have involved. Lyndsey and her team do all the heavy lifting, cracking down on the logistics and trying to make them possible. Once they’ve done all of that and events and personnel are locked-in we then work on a tight timeline providing blurbs for our curated events and the general programme.

But ultimately this role allows us to flex our curatorial, envisioning and ideating muscles — and unlike other roles that may be similar — we don’t have to do the logistical heavy lifting, which I am grateful for.

What are you most excited about bringing to the festival? 

Bringing over Thai transnational writer Thammika Songkaeo. She is a gem, and I hope our audience receives her well. I met her last year at the Ubud Reader & Writers Festival in Bali. We were both visiting writers and were co-panelists together. She is phenomenal to listen to and just as riveting to read. I really think a lot of our AWF audience will appreciate and be challenged by her whakaaro around seeking out stories and writers from places outside of the UK and the USA. But truly, as a Singaporean based Thai writer, reading her work has been a necessary kind of expansion of my own understanding of the world — and I was really focused on getting her over here not just because she is amazing but because she carries such wisdom about what it means to traverse Southeast Asia — a region of the world that I feel most of us associate with holidaying. I think this moment to bring one of their finest writers over to speak from that place, so that we might enlarge our own worldview and see the textures and humanity of the people in that region is quite special, and is a great use of the festival programming space.

Your 2025 - a year of residencies, theatre, and publishing poetry - must bring a creative energy to your work with the Festival? 

Absolutely! 2025 was a year of expansion. This guest curatorship still carries remnants of that expansive and bustling energy.

I think honestly too — this is the last project I will have for a while, as it’s over-hang (in the best kind of way) of that influx of possibility and creation from 2025. 2026 has intentionally looked a lot slower and more spacious as I close loops and start to draw into myself so that I can get into more writing and doing all the internal work to prep for another year like 2025. 

But definitely I enjoy the pendulum swings and the different ebbs and flows now. Definitely a younger version of myself would have been anxious about trying to ensure every year is like 2025. But that’s not sustainable. 

I’m just grateful I’ve been privileged enough to work in spaces like AWF that are both high performing, but they scale deep as well. The roots of the tree are just as deep as the tree is high. We need that sort of growth both as artists but also for the institutions that we work for.

You’ve been super busy since leaving the classroom full-time—that must have been quite a change in focus?

Massively. This is my second year out of the classroom full-time. And I feel so much better this time around in terms of my own time management. I have spent almost all of my life in some sort of school system whether as a student or as a teacher. And that provides a certain level of rigidity and routine. Break that routine — and what do you become? What might be possible? But also equally, what might you have to sacrifice / forgo? 

I love teaching (I’m actually currently teaching part-time unexpectedly). But I knew when I walked away from the gig full-time I felt like the rigidity was going to eat all my creativity away. 2025 was a year where I probably took on way too much, because I was like a kid seeing the world anew, and it was incredibly beautiful as well as challenging. I wouldn’t take that experience away for the world. It’s a privilege to pick and choose and have that sort of flexibility especially in this day and age, and especially as young as I am to have it. But it was a massive change — a necessary one to allow all the parts of me to breathe. I look at my years in seasons and know in any one season I’m prioritising a certain mode or way of being over another and no longer feel trapped into just being the teacher.

Your story-telling is about social change. Can you tell us more about that as a goal?

Yeah, when I talk about story-telling for social change I mean social change in its more broader definition. So I’m not thinking about how we as writers, artists, storytellers might help communities, cities, countries meet the UN’s sustainability goals — although that might happen as a result of mine or other’s work.

But when I talk about storytelling for social change I’m really talking and thinking about in what ways do the stories I make, write, speak or the spaces I curate / facilitate help us:

1/ deepen my own understanding of my own humanity (flaws and all)

2/ see the humanity in others in more organic ways.

If you could indulge me, I want to skip over point 1 and address point 2 first. I think in a world where increasingly, social cohesion and the fabric of what connects us, or should I say what has historically connected us, is deteriorating before our eyes — rather than catastrophise about it — I see this as an opportunity to build back better. Using all of the language we have now to call out racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism etc. I also see storytelling as the essential ingredient to call us in and build bonds as families and communities that allow us to really understand our differences, respect those differences, and build a more harmonious and authentic world – but it begins in our families and communities first and foremost.

And then, we come back to point 1. I want to continue to tell stories about us in all our complexities. I want to write more about characters who are so deeply flawed and yet so loved and loved upon by their community — I want to build a mirror that both represents who we are and drives us towards collectively dreaming about who we might one day become.

That’s social change on a story-telling level without getting too caught up in policy or things other people train for. Me, I’ve trained and will spend the rest of my life training to tell the story better, to surrender more, and be the vessel to carry a story forward.

What Pasifika creative are you currently reading?

Leilani Tamu, Grace Teuila Iwashita Taylor, Danielle Kionasina Dilys Thomson, Terisa Siagatonu, Vilsoni Hereniko & Epeli Hau’ofa (always).

What’s in your plan after the festival?

To cry because it’s over… and then continue on finishing up my Masters in Community Action Social Impact. Fingers crossed it’s good enough so that the door is left open for me to come back and do a PhD (in what I have no clue). But then after that – a lot of rest, hopefully some travel and just laying low. Like I said earlier I’m still working through the over-hang of 2025 aka what happens when you do all these cool projects simultaneously and sometimes back-to-back. But this quarter of my year, and kinda the year in general is all about closure and completion — so that I can go into my next season of dreaming, gathering and weaving before I return again with new shiny things, fruits of my labour and hopefully a new body of work to share.

Thanks for speaking to us, and we’re super excited to be at the Festival!

Thank you for having me!

The Auckland Writers Festival Waituhi o Tāmaki runs 12 – 17 May. For more information and tickets visit .