More Favourable Waters

More Favourable Waters is an anthology of contemporary poets from Aotearoa New Zealand commemorating one of the world’s great poets, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), 700 years after his death. The anthology will be published on 25 March 2021, which is Dante Day, chosen by the Italian Government to celebrate the poet’s legacy. For this project we are honoured to be working with the Embassy of Italy in New Zealand and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Sydney, alongside editors Marco Sonzogni (Victoria University of Wellington—Te Herenga Waka), an Italian-New Zealander, and Timothy Smith (Oxford University), a New Zealander. Each of the 33 poets has written a poem of 33 lines inspired by and including a short passage from one of the 33 cantos of Dante’s Purgatory, the second part of his epic The Divine Comedy.