Listen: Josiah Morgan's plans at the Robert Lord Writers Cottage

20 September 2026 First published RNZ

Josiah Morgan is a Christchurch-based poet, theatre practitioner and editor heading to Dunedin this week as Young Writer in Residence at the Robert Lord Writers Cottage, as part of the New Zealand Young Writers Festival. He is working on a poem of around 100 pages in which a person attempts to surgically transform their body into that of a moa, and expects to have the first quarter of a draft and a structural spine by the time he emerges on 4 October. His first publication was a 60-page single poem. The Spinoff described his work Inside the Castle as a potential landmark New Zealand poem of its era.

He joined RNZ's Culture 101 to talk about the economics of being a creative, a Dennis Cooper poem that woke him up at 16, and why he made $0.47 an hour on his last theatre production.