On health grounds, Tusiata Avia is unable to appear in this session. Michael Pedersen joins the session in her place.

Prize-winning Scottish writer and Edinburgh’s Makar (Poet Laureate) Michael Pedersen’s memoir Boy Friends is a tender, life-affirming tribute to a friend lost to suicide, and a manifesto for the sustaining power of male friendship and honest communication.

The poems of Nafanua Purcell Kersel’s Ockham NZ Book Awards-winning debut collection Black Sugarcane span light and dark, quiet and loud, calm and violence, and include a moving sequence on the devastating 2009 tsunami that struck between the Samoan islands of Upolu and Tutuila.

These phenomenal poets join Susana Lei’ataua to discuss capturing unimaginable grief – whether individual or collective – and the immense identity shifts grief brings.