New York poet Amy Leigh Wicks finds a new home in Kaikōura in The Dangerous Country of Love and Marriage, and New Zealander Nikki-Lee Birdsey plumbs the fault lines between her lives in America and Aotearoa in Night As Day, while Chicago poet Steven Toussaint composed the deeply musical poems of Lay Studies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. Sugar Magnolia Wilson hails from Fern Flat, but the poems of A Woman’s Heart is like a Needle at the Bottom of the Ocean travel to Korea and into intimate and distant histories. essa may ranapiri (Ngāti Raukawa) is a non-binary/takatāpui poet whose Ransack rummages through language and history in a search of a place to call their own. All five poets layer place and history, love and loss in their books, yet all five voices are utterly distinctive. Introduced by Chris Price, they read poems from here, there, and everywhere.

Read or download the full Writers on Mondays 2019 programme

From mid-July to October each year, the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML), home of Victoria University of Wellington's renowned creative writing programme, runs a series of events highlighting writers active in and around Wellington, as well as guests from overseas.

Events run Monday 12.15 - 1.15pm on The Marae, Level 4, Te Papa with the exception of the two Short Sharp Script sessions at Circa Theatre.

Writers on Mondays is presented with the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Phantom Billstickers, National Poetry Day and Circa Theatre.

Admission is free, all welcome. (No food to be taken onto the marae.)