Kete welcomes Gina Cole as guest editor as we celebrate Pasifika literature

Image Credit: Vicki Leopold

From 13 to 20 March Kete celebrates books by talented Pasifika authors from Aotearoa. We will be featuring a range of specially commissioned pieces selected by guest editor Gina Cole, and highlighting Pasifika books in a 2026 Pasifika Books Catalogue. Our newsletter on Friday 20th will be a special edition, packed with Pasifika features and highlighting the Pasifika Books catalogue.

Guest editor Gina Cole

Gina Cole is a prize-winning author and lawyer of Fijian, Scottish and Welsh descent. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland, and a PhD from Massey University on Pasifikafuturism. She is the author of two books, a short story collection Black Ice Matter (Huia, 2016), and Na Viro (Huia, 2022), a science fiction futuristic novel featuring Pacific culture.

Black Ice Matter won the best first book of fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Throughout her writing career, Gina has had stories published in several important anthologies and literary journals, and won various poetry and short story competitions, including an Auckland Pride Festival competition run by Express magazine with a poem titled 'Airport Aubade'. She was the first Pasifika curator at the Auckland Writers Festival, and in 2022 won the inaugural International Residency at Varuna, Australia, a partnership between the Michael King Writers Centre and Varuna, the Writers House. In 2023, Gina was awarded the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer's Residency at the University of Hawai'i.

Also in 2023, she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in the New Year Honours.

We are very excited to welcome Gina to Kete for the week, and thrilled to feature the pieces she's commissioned for our celebration of Pasifika literature.