BWB Texts: Writers' Lives

BWB Texts: Writers' Lives PDF

Author: Martin Edmond

Publisher: Bridget Williams Books

Published: 2014-12-12

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 192732792X

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Award-winning New Zealand writers Martin Edmond, Maurice Gee, Kirsty Gunn and Owen Marshall explore life and memory in this bundle of BWB Texts. These four works are combined into one easy-to-read e-book, available direct and DRM-free from our website or from international e-book retailers. Martin Edmond’s Barefoot Years is a memoir in which the author attempts to re-inhabit the lost domain of childhood. Widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s greatest fiction writers, Maurice Gee has written virtually no non-fiction. The exceptions are the two exquisite childhood reminiscences combined in a mini-memoir, Creeks and Kitchens. In this exquisitely written ‘notebook’ – ‘My Katherine Mansfield Project’ – Kirsty Gunn explores the meaning of ‘home’ in Thorndon. Owen Marshall reflects at length on his writing career and the forces that have shaped him as a writer, in Tunes for Bears to Dance To. BWB Texts are short books on big subjects by great New Zealand writers. Commissioned as short digital-first works, BWB Texts unlock diverse stories, insights and analysis from the best of our past, present and future New Zealand writing.

Late Love

Late Love PDF

Author: Glenn Colquhoun

Publisher: Bridget Williams Books

Published: 2016-10-25

Total Pages: 56

ISBN-13: 0947492909

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‘I have fought a running battle with medicine for much of my career. I have wanted to leave it for poetry. This is the story of how that has come to change for me. And how both those worlds have at last arrived at some sort of reconciliation.’ As a youth worker, doctor and award-winning poet and children’s writer, Glenn Colquhoun has led a ‘life lived in two parts’. Writing and reading has always transported him to a world ‘flickered’ by colour, warmth and connection. Meanwhile his work as a GP in the Horowhenua has confronted him daily with scenes of doubt, dislocation and disadvantage. Late Love is a meeting of these worlds, a moving attempt to show what it is, as a doctor and writer, to be alongside people.

Playing for Both Sides

Playing for Both Sides PDF

Author: Stephanie Johnson

Publisher: Bridget Williams Books

Published: 2016-08-12

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13: 0947492267

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For novelist Stephanie Johnson, her relationship with Australia and Australians has been an ambivalent one. She has lived there for periods in her life, and her first book, a collection of short stories, was actually published in Australia. She was described then as a young Australian writer, something she says she agreed to ‘for reasons that are complex and some of them hardly honourable’. For Johnson the longing to return has waxed and waned. ‘Why don’t I live there?’ she often asks herself. Yet she is a sixth-generation New Zealander. In this BWB Text Johnson explores her elusive and ambivalent feelings about the sunburnt country – which includes a musician’s road trip there with her singer-songwriter son Skyscraper Stan – and in so doing casts fascinating light on some of the formative influences that have shaped the work of this award-winning New Zealand writer.

Better Lives

Better Lives PDF

Author: Julie Fry

Publisher: Bridget Williams Books

Published: 2018-04-09

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1988533767

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Better Lives provides a comprehensive overview of immigration in New Zealand, showing how immigration is not just an economic imperative that needs to be managed, but an opportunity to enhance people's lives. This book shifts immigration debate in Aotearoa in exactly the right direction.

Living with the Climate Crisis

Living with the Climate Crisis PDF

Author: Patrick Crewdson

Publisher: Bridget Williams Books

Published: 2020-09-12

Total Pages: 117

ISBN-13: 1988587506

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‘It is there, in the background. Always. Increasingly urgent. Its ominous hum is the soundtrack to every other story we tell.’ The devastating summer of Australian bushfires underlined a terrifying sense of a world pushed to the brink. Then came Covid-19, and with it another dramatic lurch away from business as usual. Some observers are worried that the all-consuming effort to control the pandemic will distract us from the long-term challenge of limiting catastrophic climate change. At the same time, many people are hoping for a ‘green Covid-19 recovery’: a cleaner, fairer and safer world. This BWB Text brings together mātauranga Māori and Pasifika perspectives, voices from academia, activism, journalism and economics to bear witness to these troubled times.

Māui Street

Māui Street PDF

Author: Morgan Godfery

Publisher: Bridget Williams Books

Published: 2018-11-19

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1988545455

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Morgan Godfery is one of New Zealand’s most energising young thinkers. In just a few years he has become a leading voice in the country’s social and political life. Starting out under his own banner, ‘Māui Street’, his writing now appears across national and international publications. This curated selection brings together the best of Godfery’s writing. Read together, the collection charts the emergence of a significant New Zealand voice.

The Edge of Life

The Edge of Life PDF

Author: Mike Berridge

Publisher: Bridget Williams Books

Published: 2015-09-11

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 0908321341

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‘The world beyond the thought horizon is as vast as the universe, and probing it is the stuff of dreams, imaginative thinking and new technologies.’ The gap between rapid scientific progress and public understanding faces unprecedented challenges. Leading research scientist Mike Berridge explores this troubled ground from a rare vantage point. His descriptions of stunning new advances in human health are offset by hard questions about society’s ability to keep pace. This exploration brings us into contact with hotly contested public health issues, such as cancer treatment, sugar consumption, and water fluoridation. It is also a heartfelt plea to place robust and impartial science at the centre of our thinking for the future.

The Whole Intimate Mess

The Whole Intimate Mess PDF

Author: Holly Walker

Publisher: Bridget Williams Books

Published: 2017-06-12

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 0947518924

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‘I began to pull the threads of my experience back together. Instead of divergent stories about public failure, private torment, and postnatal distress, I started telling myself a united story: the truth, or as close as I could get to it.’ A Rhodes scholar and former Green MP, Holly Walker tells the story of how she became one of New Zealand’s youngest parliamentarians, how motherhood intervened, and how she found solace and solidarity in the writings of women. This short book makes a passionate case for the role of literature in political change and personal resilience, and for the importance of women’s voices in the public sphere.

Ruth, Roger and Me

Ruth, Roger and Me PDF

Author: Andrew Dean

Publisher: Bridget Williams Books

Published: 2015-05-04

Total Pages: 66

ISBN-13: 0908321236

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‘Your words of “discomfort, loss, and disconnection” don’t resonate with me at all.’ Ruth Richardson to Andrew Dean, 16 December 2014. A time of major upheaval now stands between young and old in New Zealand. In Ruth, Roger and Me, Andrew Dean explores the lives of the generation of young people brought up in the shadow of the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, those whom he calls ‘the children of the Mother of All Budgets’. Drawing together memoir, history and interviews, he explores the experiences of ‘discomfort’ and ‘disconnection’ in modern Aotearoa New Zealand.

Creeks & Kitchens

Creeks & Kitchens PDF

Author: Maurice Gee

Publisher: Bridget Williams Books

Published: 2013-04-01

Total Pages: 27

ISBN-13: 1927131774

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Widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s greatest fiction writers, Maurice Gee has written virtually no non-fiction. The exceptions are the two exquisite childhood reminiscences combined here into a memoir in this BWB Text. In this little known work, Gee describes in fascinating detail his boyhood and family life in West Auckland and offers illuminating insights into some of the creative forces which have driven some of his fiction: the creek with its dangers – where, he writes, he glimpsed ‘sex and death’ – the kitchen with his mother preparing dinner in the gathering dark, and his elderly uncle, later the model for the magnificent Plumb.