Strong Words 3: The best of the Landfall Essay Competition

Strong Words 3 showcases the best of the best of Aotearoa New Zealand’s contemporary essays from 2021 and 2022. Selected from entries into the Landfall Essay Competition, these essays are explorative, illuminating, provocative, beautifully written and – most of all – inspiring. Strong Words 3 is packed with Aotearoa New Zealand’s most compelling new writing on contemporary issues. It is essential reading. A central part of New Zealand’s literary landscape since 1997, the annual Landfall Essay Competition is Aotearoa’s most prestigious essay writing competition. Every year these essays open up new avenues of thought, explore new ways of looking at contemporary issues and bring new narratives to the forefront. Past winners include Airini Beautrais, Ashleigh Young, Gregory O’Brien, Diana Bridge, Elizabeth Smither, Tracey Slaughter, Laurence Fearnley and Alie Benge. The biennial Strong Words series was launched in 2019 and gathers the most powerful winning, shortlisted and commended Landfall Essay Competition writing within the covers of one book. Among the rich reading featured in Strong Words 3 are the 2021 and 2022 Landfall Essay Competition winners: ‘The New Man’ by Andrew Dean, a politically and socially complex piece that traces Dean’s ancestry and examines New Zealand’s shamefully long record of anti-Semitism; and ‘Lumpectomy’ by Tina Makereti, a personal and political exploration of the body and its boundaries, and health care (and its boundaries) in Aotearoa. Other essayists featured in Strong Words 3 tackle topics such as grief, lost language, poetic childhood recollections, gender, the long aftermath of colonisation, the nature of traumatic memory, and working as a comedian while solo parenting.