Sea Skins

Sea Skins explores the porous interfaces between personal, communal and environmental integrity. Slipping, sliding, going under and going overboard coexist with a determination to negotiate safe passage.

Through the lenses of heritage, migration and ecological emergency, the collection shapeshifts and evolves to examine what is both cherished and damaged. Sea skins are lifes fleeting flotsam and jetsam, teeth, tongue and bone amid dehumanising systems and alienating machines. They are word skins and survival skins. They are complex skins resisting easy categorisation, the diverse skins of sustainability and diplomacy, and ultimately, the tender under-skins at the heart of things.

About the author:Sophia Wilson is an Australian-born writer based in Aotearoa with her partner and three daughters. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies in Australasia and overseas and won awards including the 2021 Robert Burns Poetry Competition, the 2021 Hippocrates Prize, and the 2021 Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize. She hosts New Zealand Society of Authors Southland Branch Writers' Salon and is a regular aOtepoti Dunedins Octagon Collective live poetry / open mic nights. In 2022 she was joint-winner of the inaugural Flying Islands Prize for the manuscript En Cas DUrgence, subsequently published as Sea Skins.