Sam Elworthy’s top reads and your chance to win

May is the busiest time of year for every New Zealand publisher as we get a big pile of books ready for the printers in Hong Kong – so that you can all buy them for Christmas and read them over the summer holidays.

One of the great pleasures of working at Auckland University Press is the diversity of what we can take on. So long as we are pursuing the brightest minds, the biggest ideas, we have a broad remit and 2019 is no exception.

At AUP we get to publish magnificent art books. We’ve just released Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler’s Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys, published alongside the Auckland Art Gallery exhibition, and in October we’ll publish the first volume of an extraordinary two volume assessment of the work of New Zealand’s most important artist, Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction. Volume I. 1919–1959, by Peter Simpson. Art books stretch all of one’s publishing skills: we have to make a book where everything from the writing to the binding, the design to the paper quality, add up to become something a family will buy and keep for generations.

We get to work with some extraordinarily creative poets. This year we’ll publish new poetry collections by award-winning poets including Sugar Magnolia Wilson, Gregory Kan, Amy Leigh Wicks, Helen Rickerby and Anne Kennedy. Two books by poets later in the year are on our minds right now. Poet Laureate and Fast Talking PI Selina Tusitala Marsh is also, it turns out, a gifted illustrator and has written a graphic memoir for readers young and old, Mophead: How Your Difference Makes a Difference, publishing in October. And a month later we will publish Haare Williams: Words of a Kaumatua, edited by Witi Ihimaera, in which the veteran Māori broadcaster reflects in poetry and prose on growing up in Te Ao Māori.

And then sometimes at AUP we get to have fun. We’re about to send to print our first television tie in, Funny As: The Story of New Zealand Comedy, a book that takes us into the world of A Week of It and Fred Dagg, Flight of the Conchords and the Topp Twins, alongside a multi-part documentary series on TVNZ Sunday nights. It’s been a feverish run to the line, interviewing comedians and collecting images, which has kept me up at night but filled us all with excitement and energy seeing the book coming together at rocket speed.

And then sometimes I get to read books not published by Auckland University Press. We just returned from a US trip with five days in New York where I picked up (and my arms almost fell off) Robert Caro’s magnificent 1300pp biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, in which Caro – probably the best living biographer – tells the story of New York in the twentieth century through the man who built its roads and bridges, parks and beaches. Published way back in 1974, the book remains the best history there is of modern New York, of how political power works, and of how the modern city has developed for good or for ill. Now I have to find a New Zealand equivalent.

Remember - all alumni are entitled to a 15% discount on AUP books.  You can download the discount form here.

We have the beautiful Reminiscences of a Long Life by Russel Stone to give away

Emeritus Professor in History Russell Stone is an acknowledged expert of Sir John Logan Campbell, who donated Cornwall Park to Auckland in 1901. Sir John Logan Campbell was also a wonderfully gifted writer, which this book brings to life for the first time.