Big Fat Brown Bitch

Book Author Tusiata Avia
Rights Available World excl. NZ


Admire my big fat brown body, bitches!
Admire it!

The Big Fat Brown Bitch runs, sleeps, cries, laughs, splits open. She is sitting in a garage in South Auckland with her two brothers and discussing the majestic architecture of atoms. She is playing an audio book of The Power of Positive Thinking at herself. She is jumping over the lazy dog. She is lying face down in the mud and doing an apology on behalf of us all. She is receiving an election-year visit and a death threat. She is strapped to the cross. She is turning into a werewolf. The Big Fat Brown Bitch is coming for you.

Tusiata Avia, author of Ockham-award-winning The Savage Coloniser Book, returns with a brilliant and eviscerating work. These are poems of defiance, confrontation, consolation, satire, sorrow and fury.

About the Author
Tusiata Avia’s previous poetry collections are Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004; also staged as a theatre show), Bloodclot (2009), the Ockham-shortlisted Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016), and the Ockham-award-winning The Savage Coloniser Book (2020). Tusiata has held the Fulbright Pacific Writer’s Fellowship at the University of Hawai‘i in 2005 and the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury in 2010. She was the 2013 recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, and in 2020 was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. In 2023 she received a Distinguished Alumni Award from Victoria University of Wellington.

 

 

Description

Publisher
Te Herenga Waka University Press

Extent
112pp

Format
210mm x 160mm

Binding
Paperback

Category
Fiction

Genre
Poetry

Publication Date
November 2023

Rights Available:
World excl. NZ

Rights Agents:

World

Ashleigh Young,
ashleigh.young@vuw.ac.nz

Contact Te Herenga Waka University Press
about this book

The book title link will automatically be added to your message.

Tusiata Avia is one of the very best. The Savage Coloniser Book is about colonisation: past, present and future. It’s a book that expresses pain, and anger, and it shows us the impact of history on the present: sometimes by flipping situations around, and making us think – what would happen if?

Claire Mabey, The Spinoff

With exquisite poise in every aspect of its poetic execution, The Savage Coloniser Book is a torch that sets alight hundreds of years of racist kindling that has been gathering under the oppressive yoke of colonisation . . . and lets it burn.

Leilanu Tamu, Kete Books

The Savage Coloniser Book is a challenge and a gift. The thing above me
that I always thought was the sky has been revealed to be a roof, and
Avia has lifted it off me.’

Elizabeth Heritage, Stuff

Tusiata Avia places herself – her ravaged heart, her experience, wounds,
scars, thinking, feeling, her urge to speak, sing, perform, make poetry,
no matter the price . . . – in her poems, in these necessary poems.

Paula Green, NZ Poetry Shelf