Poetry Reading with Airini Beautrais and Siobhan Harvey

Join us to celebrate ‘Salt Quilt’ a new collection of poetry by Airini Beautrais, published by Te Herenga Waka University Press.

Airini will be joined by poet Siobhan Harvey- who is the current Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan Cities of Literature Writers Resident.

Airini Beautrais was born in Auckland in 1982. Her debut work of fiction, Bug Week, won Aotearoa New Zealand’s top fiction award, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize, at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Secret Heart (2006), which won the Jessie Mackay Award for First Book of Poetry at the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and the essay collection The Beautiful Afternoon (2024). In 2016 she won the Landfall Essay Prize. She lives in Whanganui.

 

Siobhan Harvey is the author of nine books, including the newly released memoir What We Remember, What We Forget (Otago University Press, 2026). A book about family, warrior motherhood, queerness, recollection, disregard, trauma and survival, it was a category winner at the 2025 Memoir Prize for Books (US) and highly commended in the 2024 Birdport Memoir Award (UK). She is shortlisted for the 2026 international Heroines Women’s Writing Prize.