Author Talk | ‘Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand’ by Jared Davidson, with Kiran Dass

Join us and Bridget Williams Books as we host an author talk on Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand by Jared Davidson. Jared Davidson will appear in conversation with literary critic and WORD Christchurch Programme Director Kiran Dass, who named Blood and Dirt in her top 3 books of 2023. The book was also longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and ranked as the best book of 2023 according to the NZ Listener, The Spinoff, RNZ, Sunday Star Times and The Australia Institute.

All welcome. Arrive from 5.30pm for a 6pm start. Approximate run time is 1 hour.

This event is free to attend – please RSVP to rsvp@scorpiobooks.co.nz.

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ABOUT THE BOOK:

Forced labour haunts the streets we walk today and the spaces we take for granted. The unfree work of prisoners has shaped New Zealand’s urban centres and rural landscapes, and Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa – the Pacific – in profound and unsettling ways. Yet these stories are largely unknown: a hidden history in plain sight.Blood and Dirt explains, for the first time, the making of New Zealand and its Pacific empire through the prism of prison labour. Jared Davidson asks us to look beyond the walls of our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prisons to see penal practice as playing an active, central role in the creation of modern New Zealand. Journeying from the Hohi mission station in the Bay of Islands through to Milford Sound, vast forest plantations, and on to Parliament itself, this vivid and engaging book will change the way you view New Zealand.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

An archivist by day and an author by night, Jared Davidson is an award-winning writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. His books include the acclaimed Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920 (Otago University Press, 2019), Sewing Freedom (AK Press, 2013), The History of a Riot (BWB Texts, 2021) and the co-authored He Whakaputanga: The Declaration of Independence (Bridget Williams Books, 2017). Through history from below, Jared explores the lives of people often overlooked by traditional histories – from working-class radicals of the early twentieth century to convicts of the nineteenth. He is currently the Research Librarian Manuscripts at the Alexander Turnbull Library.

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ABOUT THE CHAIR:

Kiran Dass is a critic, writer and Programme Lead at WORD Christchurch. She has written about music, books and culture for the NZ Herald, NZ Listener, the Guardian, North & South, Metro, The Wire, The Spinoff, Pantograph Punch, the Sunday Star-Times and many more publications. In 2021 Kiran was the convening judge of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She was awarded a Michael King Writers Centre residency in 2021. Kiran also reviews books regularly on RNZ’s Nine to Noon.