publications
I love short stories. Writing them. Reading them. Here are some recent highlights
Black Harvest
It goes like this: eight days, seven nights in a place up north to write. You arrive with the dog, and a chilly-bin of frozen meals for one. Unpack your bag of organic apples, half-carton of eggs, dark chocolate, granola, unsweetened yoghurt, small block of hard cheese. On the table you spread printed pages, coloured pens…
Tiny Galaxies
i) Did you know, she said, There’s a theory our universe might exist inside a black hole?
Really? he replied. Pass the salt.
The flurry of salt he shook onto the already seasoned steak flaked the surface like snow. When he sliced the meat, she felt it, almost. A slit down her spine…
The Years
YEAR ONE: They are always together. His hand pressing into hers, pulling her towards him when a car sweeps too close, steering her by the shoulder around obstacles on the footpath – a stroller, a bicycle, a woman tying her shoelace. The concrete is broken in places and he makes sure she doesn’t trip. She likes the way…
A full list of my publications, including links to those available online
Black Harvest
Landfall 250
OUP, 2025
It goes like this: eight days, seven nights in a place up north to write.
Pig Hunting
Newsroom
2023
I hoisted the rifle over my shoulder, released the safety and shot.
Longlines
Geometry 5
2019
The first loose thread was when Frank suggested they go out on the boat…
Makings
Poetry NZ Yearbook
Massey University Press, 2017
I will keep all lines of the wind open…
Tiny Galaxies
takahē 114
Guest Fiction Author, 2025
Did you know, she said, There’s a theory our universe might exist inside a black hole?
So Clean
Adda
2023
It’s one of those heady summer evenings, an oily haze rising off the asphalt …
Fatayer
Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand: an Anthology
OUP, 2020
Spoon honey, the colour of sunsets in your great-grandfather’s village, into an earthenware bowl…
The Years
Landfall 248
OUP, 2024
She makes plum tarts the colour of blood….
Glass Sky
Landfall 240
OUP, 2020
The sun hangs high, shiny as a coin, spilling clean shadows across the empty roof…
Black Ice
takahē 97
2019
It is thirty-six hours since you last saw your family. The cold in the air has nothing to do with weather…
Evening
New Zealand Poetry Society Anthology
2015
waiting then, in the greenness of the deepening dark…
The Visit
Newsroom
2024
The ghost of steel ran through her, like the tang of a knife…
The Neverbird
Landfall 237
OUP, 2019
You are wakened by the baby’s cry—a caw like a morning crow. It slices into the soft part of your brain…
Whales
The Three Lamps
2018
The fish was undercooked. Clare pushed it around the plate with the tip of her fork, but they were all too polite to mention it…
It shares the same sense of growing pressure, of remoteness, and carries a comparable ambiguity until a final psychological clarity that destroys so much of what went before.
~ Vincent O’Sullivan, speaking about ‘Pig Hunting’ in the judging notes for the Sargeson Prize