A long-form interview with Witi Ihimaera about Māori mythology, celestial navigation, and his fifty years of writing.

Te Motunui Epa, by Rachel Buchanan, ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’: Ruth Ross, te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History, by Bain Attwood + other titles of interest

Anna Knox brings us with her on a trail run round Waimapihi Reserve, on a journey through (re)naming, and histories of place and publishing, in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Kāwai: For Such a Time as This by Mounty Soutar; The Queen’s Wife by Joanne Drayton; The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Flectcher

“The Pākehā was Mr Nasty and the Māori Mr Nice”: a lockdown novel that tests the rules.

Empire City by John E. Martin; Fossil Treasures of Foulden Maar by Daphne Lee, Uwe Kaulfuss, John Conran; Hundertwasser in New Zealand by Andreas J Hirsch (translated by Uta Hoffmann).

To truly protect and keep NZ’s heritage alive, we need to think beyond old buildings. Heritage professionals Dr Rangi Mātāmua, Dr Paola Boarin, Sabre Baker-Anderson and Marie Dunn share their insights on what defines heritage.

Come Back to Mona Vale (Alexander McKinnon), A History of NZ in 100 Objects (Jock Phillips) and Mrs Jewel and the Wreck of the General Grant (Christina Sanders) reviewed + summer round up.

The problem with novels in which sex workers get murdered is …

I started seeing motherhood as the creative process at its best, as inherent to art as war or religion or sex, and as rich with sensibilities and source material.

Meeting our 2050 net-zero-carbon aspirations and addressing New Zealand’s housing crisis are among the most substantive challenges of our time. Retaining and retrofitting heritage buildings can be part of the solutions to both.

A new project is seeing queer histories find their places in the New Zealand Heritage List/ Rārangi Kōrero - and the Thistle Inn, where Katherine Mansfield set her late-discovered story ‘Leves Amore’ is first up.

“It was the middle of winter in Dunedin, 2008. Wet. Dark. We had snow days.” It almost sounds like the start of a tall story – the kind a verbose goldminer might have told, evening getting on, the hard day’s work done.

Highly commended

Somewhere, at some specific moment, someone wrote the very first sentence. Imagine...

Entering the show you first notice a long, spit-like installation creeping along the right-hand edge of the room

Anna Knox reviews On Eating Meat, by Australian food critic and farmer Matthew Evans, and reflects on its implications for New Zealand Farmers

Omani author Jokha Alharthi talks about the challenges she’s faced getting her Booker Prize-winning novel Celestial Bodies accepted in the West.

The thing is, I was supposed to have a sea burial but I didn’t. I jumped ship before it happened, in Lyttelton Harbour, New Zealand, 1905, en-route to Rio with a cargo of carcasses and wool.

You couldn’t understand why I wanted to come here.

It’s the middle of winter, you said. No one goes north in winter.

Musical-theatre sceptic Anna Knox writes about her conversion to the hilarious Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, as the fourth and final season drops on Netflix.

Chris McDowall and Tim Denee’s We Are Here, the first general atlas of New Zealand to be published in more than 20 years, is a ground-breaking atlas for the internet era and an outstanding success on many levels.

Many have been waiting for a book like Celestial Bodies – a story that shakes up entrenched ideas of women in the Middle East.

Art activist group the Guerrilla Girls has been calling out gender bias in the American art world since 1985. Their survey show, Reinventing the “F” Word, is in its final weeks at Auckland Art Gallery. But what’s the picture on gender representation closer to home?

Orchestral music performance is an art form, but how do you engage with something you’ve never experienced before?

A conversation with artist James R Ford about the point of contemporary art, for his forthcoming book.

Anna Knox spoke to the curator of a new exhibition of Guy Ngan’s work at the gallery in the heart of his home.

Anna Knox reviews the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s Shed Series – Responses and finds that Shed 6 transforms the experience of live classical music entirely.

After falling head-over-heels for Heartbreak Island, her first reality TV crush, Anna Knox returned eagerly for season two. Turns out there’s nothing like a first love to break your heart.

‘There’s something incredible about watching otherwise ordinary people do something extraordinary.’ A recent NZSO performance prompts Anna Knox to reflect on what makes live classical music so special.

The way in which connections are drawn between things and ideas is partly what makes Lee’s work so playful and transforms the imposing metal structure into an installation full of light, and lightness.

There is something fascinating in the hysteria and clamp-down which Heartbreak Island generated that tells us something important about ourselves.

Up the twisted back of the fish, writhing on its hook, to its whacking tail, the waka rocking above. Down below, the magnificent view, the harbour with Rangitoto like a cold grey eye, looks up at the Point where the protest signs have been resting for the night:

At the entrance to the Tuesday Market, the smell of plants is strong. With the mountain air moist and crisp, and the herbs and leaves freshly picked, the fragrances carry far.

The story behind Polhill’s regeneration is about as multifaceted and easy to follow as Finnegans Wake without the protagonist.

We went to the Mojave to see the shrimp. In some way, I suppose, I thought the shrimp were going to save us.

It’s hard to remember feeling baked like stone in summer. I’m a cicada skin. I shake when I lift the shovel trying to spread the dug-up dirt around, left over from the new plants.

The show is one huge palindrome, with Pound knows how many instances of reflection. Almost every image has a second: shadow, mirror, double.

Put the meta-narrative of repression aside for a moment and the work expands. There is menace and sadness in these images… but there is also joy…

Alneami’s images of people at a theme park in Abha instantly evoke the energy and contradictions of Saudi society.

When my husband wanted to go overnight tramping for his 40th birthday, along with our two kids and three other families, I was hesitant.

In the Saudi Arabian desert it takes time for your eyes to adjust to the light. Slowly you see through the haze: A hill here, a camel there, a thorn bush. A line of sea on the horizon.

‘Fifty years ago,’ says Omar, ‘No woman covered her face in our region.’ He is the second high-ranking Saudi from Azir who has taken pains to communicate this.