Author Talk | Lynley Edmeades with Kiran Dass

Scorpio Books and Otago University Press warmly welcome you to an author talk featuring Lynley Edmeades in conversation with Kiran Dass.

Lynley Edmeades is the author of Hiding Places, a compelling and beautifully written meditation on early motherhood and creativity published in September 2025. Told through a series of fragments that range from raw and troubled to delightful and hilarious, this remarkable book responds to the unexpected shocks and discoveries of becoming a mother, drawing on excerpts from family letters and secretive medical records, and advice contained in Truby King’s 1913 tract, Feeding and Care of Baby. This author talk will include discussion on this wonderful and strange book, already a favourite with the Scorpio Books staff.

All welcome, this is a free event. Refreshments provided. Please send in your RSVP.

About the speakers

Lynley Edmeades has an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University Belfast and a PhD in avant-garde literature from the University of Otago. Her previous books include As the Verb Tenses (OUP, 2016), Listening In (OUP, 2019) and Bordering on Miraculous, a collaboration with artist Saskia Leek (Massey University Press, 2022). She is the current editor of Landfall Tauraka and teaches English and creative writing at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka.

Kiran Dass is a critic, writer and Programme Director at WORD Christchurch and has written about books, music and culture for a variety of publications including NZ Herald, NZ Listener, Guardian, The Wire, North & South, Metro, The Spinoff, RNZ, Sunday magazine, Sunday Star-Times and Vice. In 2020 she was awarded a Michael King Writers Centre Residency, and in 2023 was the Verb Wellington Writer in Residence at Katherine Mansfield House & Garden. Dass was a judge for the 2024 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and was convening judge for the same prize in 2021. She reviews books regularly on RNZ’s Nine to Noon.