AUP New Poets 10

Distinctive, fresh and compellingly present, AUP New Poets 10 features three exciting new voices. Looking out from today at a landscape peopled with her tupuna, Tessa Keenan (Te Atiawa) writes poems filled with quiet rage and remarkable lyricism. Meanwhile romesh dissanayake plays with language to explore food, family and edgy romance, from post-war Sri Lanka to Aotearoa. And, at just 20, Sadie Lawrence reveals the excitement and anguish of being young in a complicated world: ‘ My love stands in the laundromat, Sunday best with blistered hands.’

Sadie Lawrence is a second-year university student of creative writing and media studies. Like Human Girls / all we have is noise was written from ages seventeen to nineteen. Her autism screening was inconclusive. romesh dissanayake is a writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. His work has appeared in The Spinoff, The Pantograph Punch, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (edited by Paula Morris and Alison Wong). His first novel, When I open the shop, was the winner of the 2022 Modern Letters Fiction Prize and is forthcoming from THWUP in 2024. Anne Kennedy is the author of three novels, a novella, four books of poetry, and many anthologised short stories. Her first book of poetry Sing-song was named Poetry Book of the Year at the 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. The Darling North won the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry and Moth Hour was a poetry finalist at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Tessa Keenan (Te Atiawa) is from Taranaki and is now based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She would like to thank her whanau, partner, friends and tupuna for the constant inspiration and support during the writing of her chapbook. Her poems have appeared in Starling, a fine line, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and Puhia.