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Book Launch | 3 November 2025

Book Launch | Giving Birth to My Father by Tusiata Avia

Literature
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Acclaimed poet Tusiata Avia MNZM has been appointed Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) and Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence for 2026.

Tusiata has received many significant awards including the 2013 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, a 2023 Te Herenga Waka Distinguished Alumni Award, and the 2024 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.

In 2020, she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. In 2024, Tusiata received a Creative New Zealand Senior Pacific Artists Award.

Tusiata’s poetry collections include Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004, also staged as a theatre show), Bloodclot (2009), the Ockham-shortlisted Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016), the Ockham-award-winning The Savage Coloniser Book (2020, also staged as The Savage Coloniser Show), and Big Fat Brown Bitch (2023). Her new book, Giving Birth to My Father, will be published on 6 November 2025.

Giving Birth to My Father is about learning to live with a loss that seems simply too heavy to bear. First, Tusiata Avia tells the imagined story – the one of how things should go – followed by the story of what really happens. As her father travels through his last days and into the arms of his tupu’aga, transformed, the family gathers around him with their love and raw need, and their suffering turns to storm clouds.
For Avia, his death is a beginning. Parent and child have switched places as the river carries them downstream, and she sees her father with new eyes. But this is also a time of not knowing to whom she belongs and where she will be welcome now.
This is an extraordinarily rich poetic work about grief and renewal that will rearrange its readers. Giving Birth to My Father takes in a world of family and memory, including a sequence of poems about a much-loved brother as he faces a life-threatening injury. It is a book about ways of holding one another even after we are gone.
The book will be launched on Saturday 15 November, 5pm at Space Academy with books for sale provided by Scorpio Books. All welcome.
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