Writers on Mondays – Sand and Sugarcane: Nafanua Purcell Kersel and Mikaela Nyman
Victoria University Press presents a series of events highlighting the very latest work of Aotearoa New Zealand writers. A lively and stimulating way to begin the week.
Two poets discuss climate change, resilience, and political poetry from Pacific and Nordic perspectives in urgent contemporary voices.
Mon 21 Jul 2025, 12.15–1.15pm
Rongomaraeroa, the marae, Level 4
Free event with museum entry
In this event, two poets discuss climate change, resilience, and political poetry from Pacific and Nordic perspectives.
The poems in Biggs Family Prize in Poetry winner Nafanua Purcell Kersel’s Black Sugarcane can sting and soothe, revealing a paradise despoiled by climate change and colonisation, and celebrating a people resilient in the face of it all.
Mikaela Nyman is from the autonomous, demilitarised Åland Islands in Finland. Her first poetry collection in English, Anatomy of Sand, follows on from her climate fiction novel Sado.
These two urgent contemporary voices join Tamara Tulitua in a conversation about rising seas, political and personal poetry, and the local and global.
Right: Nafanua Purcell Kersel. Left: Mikaela Nyman. Both photos by Ebony Lamb Photographer