PACKING A PUNCH
Michelle Duff + Airana Ngarewa
Michelle Duff’s Surplus Women explores power and patriarchy. Airana Ngarewa’s Pātea Boys delivers stories grounded in masculinity, place, and what it takes to survive. Chaired by Sunday Star-Times Short Story Award winner Fiona Sussman.
Together, they explore short story writing as a form built for impact and discuss why they’re drawn to writing about people and places often left out of the national narrative.
Michelle Duff’s Surplus Women is an unforgettable collection of stories about women in past, present and future Aotearoa, challenging gender expectations with powerful prose, sometimes poignant and sometimes playful. The title story was inspired by the young women sent as domestic help from Britain to Aotearoa NZ from England in the 1850s. Duff’s cast of hungry teenage girls, top detectives who forget to buy milk, frustrated archivists, duplicitous real estate agents, and ‘surplus women’ are all as vivid as wafts of Impulse from a backpack in the 90s.
Airana Ngarewa’s second book, Pātea Boys, delivers raw, powerful stories in a lively and playful bilingual collection of stories about growing up in Pātea. Interlinked and full of recurring characters, these stories are about growing up in small-town Aotearoa – sneaking away during cross country, doing bombs while the lifeguard isn’t looking, peeling spuds on the marae, crashing a car at age four, and learning to live by the tikanga ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. Exuberant, exciting, poignant and heartfelt, each story is featured in English and te reo Māori. The perfect resource for those on their reo learning journeys as well as for readers who enjoyed his debut novel, The Bone Tree.
All books will be on sale through our festival bookstore partner, Paper Plus Nelson, both in store at 237 Trafalgar Street Nelson, online, and at our Pukapuka Talks venues – get your copies signed by the authors after their session! If you’re buying online, please select the Nelson store to collect in person.
Airana Ngarewa
Airana Ngarewa (Ngāti Ruanui, Ngā Rauru, Ngāruahine) was born and raised in Pātea, a small town in Aotearoa famous for the song Poi E. His first novel, The Bone Tree, was published in 2023 and was the number-one bestselling book of fiction in New Zealand for 11 weeks. His second book, Pātea Boys, was released in 2024. His new book, The Last Living Cannibal, is set in Taranaki during the 1940s. It explores the concept of ‘muru’ as attempt to find balance rather than an act of revenge and is destined to become the epitome of a classic Aotearoa novel.
Michelle Duff
Michelle Duff is a journalist and writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She was the winner of the 2023 Fiction Prize from the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her journalism has appeared in Aotearoa and internationally, including in the Guardian, Stuff, New Zealand Geographic, the Melbourne Age and the Sunday Times.
Fiona Sussman
Former family doctor Fiona Sussman hung up her stethoscope in 2003 to pursue another long-held dream, to write. Published internationally, she is the author of five novels and numerous short stories. Her novel The Last Time We Spoke won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel in 2017 and was shortlisted for the NZ Heritage Prize in 2016. Her novel Addressed to Greta launched Bateman Books’ fiction list and went on to win the NZ Booklovers Award for Best Adult Fiction in 2021. Fiona’s short stories have also received critical acclaim, including ‘Mad Men’, which won the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Award in 2018, and ‘A Breath, A Bunk, A Land, A Sky’, which was shortlisted from over five thousand entries for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2020. Her latest crime novel, Hooked Up, will be published by Bateman Books in September. Fiona is currently living in Nelson.
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