BOOK LAUNCH – The Beautiful Afternoon by Airini Beautrais
When: 5:30pm, March 19, 2024 – 7:00pm, March 19, 2024
Cost: Free
You are invited to attend the launch of The Beautiful Afternoon, a book of essays by Airini Beautrais.
The book will be launched by Fergus Barrowman from Te Herenga Waka University Press.
Free to attend, refreshments will be served.
About the book:
In The Beautiful Afternoon, award-winning poet and short-story writer Airini Beautrais plumbs history, literature, Star Wars, sea hags, beauty products, tarot, swimwear, environmentalism and pole dancing to deliver a virtuoso inquiry into how we become, and change, who we are.
Beautrais surveys the many influences on her life, from Lord Byron and Dante to Dolly magazine and 90s R&B, with intense curiosity and a fierce intelligence. Whether saving the planet in her Quaker childhood and activist youth, surviving the lonely years of early motherhood, or confronting the fears and freedoms of midlife – in which she writes about the body becoming a poem and human touch beginning to feel safe again – Beautrais’ lucid examination of experience reveals that the personal is inescapably political.
Throughout these wide-ranging essays her vigilant critique of entrenched patriarchal control turns anger to resistance, as a woman finds a way out of its grip, back to herself and the world.
More info: https://teherengawakapress.co.nz/the-beautiful-afternoon/
Airini Beautrais was born in Auckland in 1982. Her debut work of fiction, Bug Week, won Aotearoa New Zealand’s top fiction award, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize, at the 2021 NZ Book Awards. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Secret Heart (VUP, 2006), which won the Jessie Mackay Award for First Book of Poetry at the 2007 NZ Book Awards. In 2016 she won the prestigious Landfall Essay Prize. Airini is also a science teacher and dance instructor. This is her first collection of essays.
– Author Photo captured by Skye Boniface.