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Fast talking PI

Due to a bereavement, Selina will now be out of the country in September. Our condolences to the family. We will be in touch with ticketholders about refunds.

Join us for what is sure to be a dazzling evening of poetry and fun as Selina Tusitala Marsh and Peter Malcouronne reunite to talk about the good old days and Selina’s stellar career as a poet, actor and writer.

Selina Tusitala Marsh (ONZM, FRSNZ) is the former Commonwealth Poet, New Zealand Poet Laureate and acclaimed performer and author.  In 2019 she was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to poetry, literature and the Pacific community. 

In 2020 Selina was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.  Selina is the first internally promoted full Professor of Pasifika descent and lectures in the English Department at the University of Auckland where she teaches Creative Writing and Pacific Literature.


Selina has performed poetry for primary schoolers and presidents (Obama), queers and Queens (HRH Elizabeth II).


She has published three critically acclaimed collections of poetry, Fast Talking PI (2009), Dark Sparring (2013), Tightrope (2017).  Her graphic memoir, Mophead (2019), won the Margaret Mahy Supreme Book in the 2020 NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults and won the PANZ Best Book Design for 2020. Its sequel, Mophead TU: The Queen's Poem was shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards (2021), both books are core to current mental health and wellbeing school curricula development. She is writing and drawing Mophead: KNOT Book 3.


Peter Malcouronne has won numerous national and international journalism awards during a two-decade feature writing career which began with a 1997 story on a nudist camp open day for The Listener – and ended in ignominy and exile in Melbourne where he became a vassal for the National Australia Bank.

He has written one poem and two books – a non-best-selling rugby tome published just before the 2011 Rugby World Cup, and a rather more successful 2018 collaboration on Aotea Great Barrier with photographer Chris Morton (“An ordinary place full of extraordinary stories,” wrote The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly). Returning to Aotearoa in 2017, Peter is now Chief Propagandist for apartment builders, Ockham Residential.

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