AUP New Poets 10

Three poets explore race, indigeneity, gender, history, neurodiversity, love and loss.

Distinctive, fresh and compellingly present, AUP New Poets 10 features three exciting new voices.

Looking out from today at a landscape peopled with her tupuna, Tessa Keenan (Te Atiawa) writes poems filled with quiet rage and remarkable lyricism. Meanwhile romesh dissanayake plays with language to explore food, family and edgy romance, from post-war Sri Lanka to Aotearoa. And, at just 20, Sadie Lawrence reveals the excitement and anguish of being young in a complicated world: 'My love stands in the laundromat, Sunday best with blistered hands.'

AUTHORS

Tessa Keenan (Te Atiawa) is from Taranaki and is now based in Poneke. You can find her writing in various Aotearoa publications including Starling, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, a fine line, and Puhia.

romesh dissanayake is a writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. His work has appeared in The Spinoff, The Pantograph Punch, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (edited by Paula Morris and Alison Wong). His first novel, When I open the shop, was the winner of the 2022 Modern Letters Fiction Prize and is forthcoming from THWUP in 2024.

Sadie Lawrence is a second-year university student of creative writing and media studies. Like Human Girls / all we have is noise was written from ages seventeen to nineteen. Her autism screening was inconclusive.