Sun and Sea - new books from V.U Press

Media release 8 February 2007 immediate

Sun and Sea - new books from Victoria University Press

Two new books "Sol" and "News of the Swimmer Reaches Shore", by notable New Zealand writers Andrew Johnston and Gregory O´Brien, have just been published.

Andrew Johnston, resident in France for a number of years working as an editor for the International Herald Tribune, has published his fifth collection of poetry "Sol", illuminating with humour and curiosity the ways we link language, loss, history and memory. At the heart of "Sol" are two major poems. `Les Baillessats´ is a relaxed, sun-filled poem to his newborn son. `The Sunflower´, an elegy for his father, is a technically dazzling double sestina, and a grave extended meditation on death, family and religious faith.

This year Andrew returns to Wellington as the 2007 J.D. Stout Fellow at Victoria University, where he is writing a book about contemporary New Zealand poetry. He is the author of "Birds of Europe" (2000), "The Open Window" (1999), "The Sounds" (1996) and "How to Talk" (1993), which won the 1994 New Zealand Book Award for Poetry and the 1994 Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award. He also edits The Page, an online digest of some of the Web´s best poems and essays.

At once a travel book, an autobiographical novel and free-floating meditation on Europe and the Antipodes, "News of the Swimmer Reaches Shore" begins with its narrator suspended in the salty, tideless waters of the Mediterranean.

Adrift on an ocean of art history, literature and music, of memories and a dream-like present, Gregory O´Brien introduces a cast of underwater characters that includes Jacques Cousteau, the French secret service agent Dominique Prieur, Henri Matisse and the naked river-swimming nineteenth-century nun Mother Aubert. Modernism, the politics of French nuclear testing, swimming, drowning and underwater explosions are twined together with the life of a family in an innovative and engaging exploration by one of New Zealand´s most celebrated writers.

Gregory O´Brien is one of the leading New Zealand writers of his generation. He is primarily a poet, but is also very active as essayist, editor, curator and art writer. His collection of essays, "After Bathing at Baxter´s", was published to acclaim in 2002. His introduction to New Zealand art for children, "Welcome to the South Seas", won a New Zealand Post Book Award for Children & Young Adults in 2005. In 2005 he was a guest writer at the Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam, and travelled to Moscow for the launching of "Land of Seas", an anthology of New Zealand poetry translated into Russian. He is a contributing editor to the American literary annual Fulcrum.

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