Review: Strong Words 4, edited by Lynley Edmeades

Part of the power of an essay collection is hearing how one writer’s words spark off another’s, creating conversation across the pages. In Strong Words 4, that conversation feels urgent and alive: diverse in voice, experimental in form, and deeply rooted in contemporary Aotearoa.

This volume gathers 20 essays from the Landfall competitions of 2023 and 2024, with selecting editor Lynley Edmeades framing them as all in some way about ‘how we live, how we want to live, how we (might) get it right, how we got/get it wrong.’ Edmeades also highlights the form’s significance: ‘In these pages, the essay is a “social space”, where writers wrestle with themselves and ideas.’

The range of subjects is broad: from identity and family to health and work. Some essays look outward to New Zealand’s place in the world; others turn inward to daily pressures. What unites them is conviction – that the personal can illuminate wider systems and ideas.

The 2023 winner, Siobhan Harvey’s ‘The Jigsaw of Broken Things’, sets the tone. Fragmented in form, it weaves memory, headlines, and history to explore queer identity. Harvey’s opening line is a kind of manifesto for the collection: ‘Let me piece this together, scattered as it is across the lifespan of my memory. As if, little by little, I can make it into something complete.’ From the outset, Strong Words 4 signals essays that resist convention, play with form, and investigate what New Zealand is, and what it might become.

Several pieces consider migration and belonging. In ‘Choosing Sides’, Anne Marie Basquin wrestles with the pull between her American background and her new Kiwi identity, finding release in the sea: ‘Underwater wasn’t American or Kiwi—I didn’t have to choose sides.’ Julie Hill, meanwhile, wonders how pōhutukawa trees appeared in Portugal: ‘I know that plant seeds, just like humans, can go on OEs,’ she writes, before asking, ‘How did they get there, as far away as geographically possible, all tangled up in someone else’s history?’

Home ownership is tackled from unexpected angles. Penny Hunt’s ‘Ghost House’ examines both the shame of not owning and the hidden costs of holding on. Renting in Germany ‘felt like an empowered choice,’ she recalls, compared with New Zealand where ‘renting makes us feel like second-class citizens.’ That tension reverberates through her mother’s story: ‘It pains me to think my mother stayed in an unhappy marriage not just to keep us all together under one roof but also to keep possession of a house she loved.’ The result is a bittersweet meditation on property as tether, constraint, and inheritance.

Another highlight of the collection is the inclusion of the winners of the Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Competition. Emerging voices sit confidently alongside seasoned essayists, suggesting a vibrant future for the form in Aotearoa. Emma Hughes’ ‘Fourteen Robyns’ takes us into the immediacy and turbulence of a Family Planning clinic: ‘It’s as hard to get here as it is to be here,’ Hughes admits. ‘We arrive late and desperate—saying sorry before we say hello.’

One of the enduring strengths of the essay form is its breadth. In a collection like this, that range is both challenge and reward. A couple of pieces didn’t resonate as strongly for me, but that felt more about taste than quality. At a certain point, reading essays is always subjective. What is clear is the consistent calibre of writing across the collection, with contributions that are rigorous, inventive, and often moving.

In the end, Strong Words 4 reaffirms the importance of Landfall’s platform. No other essay competition in New Zealand has this reach, and its continuation feels essential – not only for the writers it champions, but for the literary history it sustains. Encountering the non-winning essays, which hold their own beside the prize-winners, is part of the book’s reward. The result is a portrait of an art form very much alive in Aotearoa.