Bøger udgivet af Otago University Press

This book explores contemporary migration to New Zealand through an examination of 200 personal essays written by 37 migrants from 20 different countries, spanning all ages and life stages. The first book to examine migration through the lens of the personal essay, The Braided River presents migration as a lifelong experience that affects everything from language, home, work, family, and friendship to finances, citizenship, and social benefits. Throughout, Diane Comer, both migrant and essayist herself, demonstrates the versatility of the personal essay as a means to analyze and understand migration, an issue with increasing relevance worldwide.

In My Body, My Business, eleven New Zealand sex workers speak in their own voices about their lives in and out of the sex industry. Based on a series of oral history interviews, the book includes the stories of female, male, and transgender workers, upmarket brothels, escorts, strippers, private workers, and dominatrices. Caren Wilton prefaces the book with an introductory essay about the New Zealand sex industry, which in recent times has seen a lot of changes, the most profound being the decriminalization of prostitution in 2003. This engaging and highly readable book looks at what the changes have meant for the nation's sex workers.

Many New Zealand writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century traveled extensively or lived overseas for a time. In The Expatriate Myth, Helen Bones presents a challenge to this conventional understanding that writers had to leave in order to find literary inspiration and publishing opportunities. Was it actually necessary for them to leave to find success? How prevalent was expatriatism among New Zealand writers? Did their experiences fit the usual tropes about expatriatism and exile? Were they fleeing an oppressive society lacking in literary opportunity? In the field of literary studies, scholars are often consumed with questions about ‘national' literature and ‘what it means to be a New Zealander'. And yet many of New Zealand's writers living overseas operated in a transnational way, taking advantage of colonial networks in a way that belies any notion of a single national allegiance. Most who left New Zealand continued to write about and interact with their homeland, and in many cases came back. In this fascinating and clear-sighted book, Helen Bones offers a fresh perspective on some hoary New Zealand literary chestnuts.

New Zealanders started hearing things in different ways when new audio technologies arrived from overseas in the late 19th century. In The World's Din, Peter Hoar documents the arrival of the first such "e;talking machines"e; and their growing place in New Zealanders' public and private lives, through the years of radio to the dawn of television. In so doing, he chronicles a sonic revolution-the radical change in the way New Zealanders heard the world. Audio technology, since its advent in the late 19th century, has been a continued refinement of the original innovation, even in the contemporary era of digital sound, with iPods, streaming audio, and Spotify. The World's Din is a beautifully written account of this refinement in New Zealand that will delight music-lovers and technophiles everywhere.

In 1918, a miner on the run from the military wrote a letter to his sweetheart. Two months later he was in jail. Like millions of others, his letter had been steamed open by a team of censors shrouded in secrecy. Using their confiscated mail as a starting point, Dead Letters reveals the remarkable stories of people caught in the web of wartime surveillance. Among them were a feisty German-born socialist, an affectionate Irish nationalist, a love-struck miner, an aspiring Maxim Gorky, and two mystical dairy farmers with a poetic bent. Military censorship within New Zealand meant that their letters were stopped, confiscated, and filed away, sealed and unread for over 100 years. Until now.

The Depression of the 1930s was a defining period in New Zealand history. It had its own vocabulary – swaggers and sugarbags, relief work and sustenance, the Queen Street riots and special constables – that was all too familiar to those who lived through that tumultuous decade. But one generation's reality is another's history. The desperate struggles experienced by many for work, food and shelter during the 1930s eventually gave way to the sunny postwar years, when the Depression was no more than an uncomfortable memory. And now, for the children of the twenty-first century, it's just a word. While the lives of those most affected by the Depression have been admirably documented in oral histories in various forms, the political and economic context, and the manoeuvrings and responses to the unprecedented conditions have not, until now, been given the extensive analysis they deserve. The Broken Decade, Malcolm McKinnon's detailed and absorbing history of this period, unpicks the Depression year by year. It begins by introducing the prosperous world of New Zealand in the late 1920s before focusing on the sudden onset of the Depression in 1930–31, the catastrophic months that followed and, finally, on the attempt to find a way back to that pre-Depression prosperity. Informed by exhaustive research, relevant statistics and fascinating personal accounts, and made accessible and meaningful by insightful analysis, this important book will become New Zealand's definitive study of the 1930s Depression.

Originally published in 2001, A City Possessed is the harrowing account of one of New Zealand's most high-profile criminal cases – a story of child sexual abuse allegations, gender politics and the law.In detailing the events of the 1990s that led up to and surrounded the allegations made against several staff of the Christchurch Civic Cre`che, author Lynley Hood shows how and why such a case could happen. A City Possessed won the Montana Medal for Non-Fiction at the 2002 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.Her penetrating analysis of the social and legal processes by which the conviction of Peter Ellis was obtained, and repeatedly upheld, raises major issues for our justice system and the way we see ourselves. Peter Ellis served seven years of a 10-year jail sentence for abusing seven children at the Christchurch Civic Cre`che. He has always maintained his innocence, and has gained widespread support for what many see as a miscarriage of justice.This paperback edition comes at a time when Peter Ellis and the Christchurch Civic Cre`che case have returned to public attention. In July 2019, a terminally ill Ellis was granted a final appeal to the Supreme Court, scheduled for November 2019.

In this original second collection, Lynley Edmeades turns her attention to ideas of sound, listening and speech. Listening In is full of the verbal play and linguistic experimentation that characterised her first collection, but it also shows the poet pushing the form into new territories. Her poems show, often sardonically, how language can be undermined: linguistic registers are rife with uncertainties, ambiguities and accidental comedy. She shuffles and reshuffles statements and texts, and assumes multiple perspectives with the skill of a ventriloquist. These poems probe political rhetoric and linguistic slippages with a sceptical eye, and highlight the role of listening -- or the errors of listening -- in everyday communication.

Judging her first Landfall Essay Competition in 2018, Landfall editor Emma Neale was seriously challenged. The overall high quality of the 90 submissions made it impossible to choose. After a nails-bitten-to-the-quick struggle, she optimistically submitted her shortlist of 21 essays. The publisher had some strong words with her. Emma was told a shortlist needed to be shorter than 21. A lot shorter. There were no fingernails left to chew. She wasnt flexible enough to bite her toes. The only thing left to gnaw down was the too-long list. In the end she pared the list back to 10 but it seemed so wasteful not to be awarding many more prizes. The world needed to be able to read these damned fine essays. Thats when this book was born ... Strong Words is a striking collection of essays that show what Virginia Woolf once described as the art that can at once sting us wide awake and yet also fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life. It celebrates an extraordinary year in New Zealand writing.