19 Jul 2016
Award-winning poet and playwright launches first collection of short stories.
Tail of the Taniwha is a collection of short stories by writer, poet and playwright Courtney Sina Meredith that builds on the themes and ideas of her signature publications, Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick and the award-winning play, Rushing Dolls.
Meredith received a writing grant from Creative New Zealand to create the work and the book will be launched in Auckland in August.
“This is fine work. There is a lot of energy in the prose and on the strength of the observations and insights along the way we trust the voice.” - Lloyd Jones, author.
“Meredith’s voice is an exciting addition to New Zealand and Pacific literatures. That voice is full of gusto, attuned to a range of lived and heart realities.’’ - Robert Sullivan, poet.
Tail of the Taniwha push at the boundaries of written storytelling through their use of unusual graphic arrangements and typographic techniques as a narrative device. The end result is an idiosyncratic collection of stories that come alive in the way they interact with the page.
Tail of the Taniwha advances, with an underlying Pacific politique, an ongoing discussion of the contemporary urban experience and what it means to be culturally sensitive in contrast of the general understandings of mainstream society.
Tail of the Taniwha is published by Beatnik Publishing and available on hardback, RRP $29.99 from www.beatnikshop.com
About the author
fiction writer and musician of Samoan, Mangaian and Irish descent. She describes her writing as an ‘ongoing discussion of contemporary urban life with an underlying Pacific politique.’
She was the first New Zealander and first writer of Pacific descent to hold the LiteraturRaum Blebitreu Berlin residency in 2011, and is an invited participant in the 2016 University of Iowa International Writing Program Fall Residency.
Her poetry and prose have been translated into Italian, German, Dutch, French, Spanish and Bahasa Indonesia.
Tail of the Taniwha is Meredith’s first book of short stories and follows her much lauded 2012 collection of poems Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick (Beatnik Publishing) and multi award-winning 2010 play Rushing Dolls (Playmarket, 2012).
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