Join us to launch a new book of poetry by the incredible Tusiata Avia.
Saturday 15 November, 5pm
Space Academy: 371 St Asaph Street, Christchurch
Books will be for sale with thanks to Scorpio Books
Kai and refreshments provided
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.
Tusiata Avia is the award-winning author of
Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004; also staged internationally),
Bloodclot (2009),
Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016),
The Savage Coloniser Book (2020; winner of the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry and also staged nationally) and
Big Fat Brown Bitch (2023). Tusiata has held the Fulbright Pacific Writers Fellowship at the University of Hawai‘i in 2005 and the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury in 2010. She was the 2013 recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, and in 2020 was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. In 2023 she was given a Distinguished Alumni Award at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
