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Reading, Wellington, and whatever else – teenblog@wcl.govt.nz

Tag: NZ authors

Books Alive: Damien Wilkins and the Subtle Art of Surprise

The announcement of the winners of the 2020 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults draws nigh! To celebrate, we’ve invited YA Fiction Award nominee Damien Wilkins (Aspiring, 2019) to run an awesome creative writing workshop for teens called ‘The Subtle Art of Surprise.’ How does language do its tricks? How do we harness its power to pull our readers in? And once we’ve pulled them in, how do we keep them guessing as to what will happen next?

The answers to these questions and more will be yours, should you attend the workshop! Deets below:

What: The Subtle Art of Surprise with Damien Wilkins
Where: Johnsonville Library at Waitohi Community Hub
When: Friday 7 August, 4.00pm

Sadly, we cannot guarantee pizza for this event, but we can guarantee intellectual enlightenment and snacks. Oh, how the snacks will flow. What more could you possibly need?

In case you’ve forgotten, here’s an excerpt from our blog post about the NZ Book Awards where we talk about Damien’s book, Aspiring, and its general awesomeness:

Aspiring / Wilkins, Damien
Our thoughts: We loved the verbosity and relatability of 15-year-old Ricky’s near-constant internal monologue throughout this book — it’s full of the kinds of observations about life in a small town that we recognise and empathise with. It’s exciting to see the author’s bold and unpretentious voice applied to young adult themes and characters for the first time in this book, and we’re hoping there’s more to come in this space in the future!

Pete’s was where I had an after-school job. There was no one at the restaurant called Pete. The owner’s name was Garth but he hadn’t got around to changing the name. He didn’t want to climb on a ladder and paint it up. ‘Besides,’ Garth said, ‘who’d want to come to a place called Garth’s? Sounds like someone clearing his throat.’

I wouldn’t have needed a ladder.

— Damien Wilkins, Aspiring, Massey University Press, 2020.

FOR SCIENCE!

Science: it’s not just a subject at school. It’s what makes the world what it is. The books below explore stories using experimental sciences we’re perhaps less familiar with right now, but could perhaps plausibly be present in the near future. Cryogenic freezing, internet implants, DNA harvesting – see for yourself whether you think it could happen (or just accept it and go OOH COOL! SCIENCE!)

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsWhen We Wake, Karen Healey

Sixteen year-old Tegan has been cryogenically frozen, but her jump to the future was not planned, and she wakes up 100 years past her former present-time of 2027. She discovers she is the first unknowing government test subject to be frozen and successfully revived. Tegan’s not so sure about the benefits of her unique situation, and things get even more complicated when she discovers appalling secrets about her new world. Tegan faces a choice: keep her head down and live her second chance at life, or help fight for a better future.

When We Wake is the first in a series (the sequel is called While We Run) and it is a finalist in the LIANZA Children’s Book Awards 2014!

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsFeed, M.T. Anderson

Titus and his friends thought this trip was going to be just like any other trip to the moon. That is, a chance to party hard over spring break. But that was until the hacker got into their brain-implanted internet feeds and caused them all to malfunction, sending Titus and his friends into hospital with an eerie nothingness in their heads. It is especially strange in contrast to the 24/7 bombardment of consumer customised broadcasts and advertisements which normally stream directly into their brains. And then Titus meets beautiful and brainy Violet, who is determined to fight the omnipresent feed before it destroys everyone.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsOrigin, Jessica Khoury

Pia has spent her whole life so far in a secret laboratory in the Amazon rainforest, raised by a team of scientists as the first of a new immortal race of people. But on the night of her 17th birthday, Pia finds a way to escape, and she leaves the compound for the first time. Outside, she meets a village boy named Eio, and together they race against time to find the deadly truth about Pia’s origin.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsThe Adoration of Jenna Fox, Mary E. Pearson

In the near future, 17 year old Jenna Fox has just woken up from a coma caused by a terrible accident a year ago. At least, that’s what they tell her, but what happened before that? Jenna doesn’t remember her life, and what she does remember she can’t even be sure is real. Jenna must seek out the truth of her mysterious past and learn to live with the implications it may have for her future.

Book cover courtesy of SyndeticsThe House of the Scorpion, Nancy Farmer

“Matteo Alacran was not born; he was harvested with the DNA from El Patron, lord of a country called Opium. Can a boy who was bred to guarantee another’s survival find his own purpose in life? And can he ever be free?” (Goodreads)

A short post about short stories

We promise, absolutely and completely, that this is our last post about New Zealand Book Month. For this year at least. We hope you’ve read something New Zealand related this month or better yet, been to an event! If you haven’t, never fear, there’s still time (and a long weekend) to do so. Why not check out some New Zealand short stories, it will take mere minutes and the library has some great collections!

book cover courtesy of SyndeticsEssential New Zealand Short Stories, edited by Owen Marshall

The contents page of this collection reads as a who’s who of New Zealand writing greats including Katherine Mansfield, Janet Frame, Patricia Grace, Joy Cowley, Maurice Gee, Frank Sargeson and many, many more. The collected works span 80 years which demonstrates the way short stories, as a genre, have changed over time (or not). In his introduction Owen Marshall says the reason short stories can be found right through New Zealand writing history is because “they form a resilient genre with its own idiosyncratic pulse of literary energy.” We have to agree! There’s a certain charming idiosyncrasy right through this collection and all the others as well.

book cover courtesy of SyndeticsEarthless Trees, edited by Pauline Frances

This collection features the work of several young refugees who came to New Zealand seeking security and freedom with their families. From an escape through mountains on an overloaded truck, to living through an explosion in urban Kabul, these stories touch on universal themes: survival, family, home and friends. We love that this collection gives a poignant and, at times, heartbreaking, insight into the lives of some of our refugees.

book cover courtesy of SyndeticsLike Wallpaper, edited by Barbara Else

The authors featured in this collection are a combination of established like David Hill or Fleur Beale and stunning newcomers like Natasha Lewis and Samantha Stanley. The settings are New Zealand homes and flats, local schools and roads, beaches, rivers, cities. There is a mixture of tone, voice, and form. Issues addressed in the stories range across aspects of peer pressure and friendship. Parents and family relationships feature as do young romance, sexuality, and death. All in all, it’s a capacious collection with several quirky stories you’re bound to love. Hopefully ponder as well.

book cover courtesy of Syndetics50 short short stories by young New Zealanders edited by Graeme Lay

Tandem Press invited New Zealanders aged 18 and under to submit a short story (no more than 500 words) for a writing competition. This collection is the 50 best entries they received. They provide a much broader overview than Earthless Trees of what being a teenager is like in New Zealand and over the course of fifty stories, the themes covered include all the joys and concerns of daily life: peer pressure, rivalry, first love, and questions of identity and belonging; of moving or subtle relationships with friends and family. These are great to read if you’re an aspiring writer yourself because they give an idea of the kind of style and content that one publishing house consider to be good.

Think you can do better? Then a list of writing competitions in New Zealand can be found here including details about the Re-Draft competition. The winners of that are published annually, several collections of which the library has here, here and here. However they don’t get a blurb of their own because they include poetry and because we promised a short post. So there you have it. Short stories are the best! They get to the point within the time of my attention span, they’re often strange and quirky and, best of all, they leave you wondering. And there we will end our very last post about New Zealand Book Month. May you now dazzle your friends and family with your knowledge of homegrown literary talent!

Happy Easter!

R n R