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. 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. Chaired by Sunday Star-Times Short Story Award winner Fiona Sussman.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
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. Michelle 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 The Bone Tree.