My father has been chipping himself down since he arrived here,
he is half man and half vessel, readying for the journey to Hawaiki.

Giving Birth to My Father is about learning to live with a loss that at first seems too heavy to bear.

In her new book, Tusiata Avia tells the imagined story – the one of how things should go – followed by the story of what really happens. As her father travels through his last days and into the arms of his tupu’aga, transformed, the family gathers around him with their love and raw need, and their suffering turns to storm clouds.

For Avia, his death is a beginning. Parent and child have switched places as the river carries them downstream, and she sees her father with new eyes. But this is also a time of not knowing to whom she belongs and where she will be welcome now.

This is an extraordinarily rich poetic work about grief and renewal that will rearrange its readers. Giving Birth to My Father takes in a world of family and memory, including a sequence of poems about a much-loved brother as he faces a life-threatening injury. It is a book about ways of holding one another even after we are gone.

Author Biography

Tusiata Avia’s previous poetry collections are Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004; also staged internationally as a theatre show), Bloodclot (2009), the Ockham-shortlisted Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016), the Ockham-award-winning The Savage Coloniser Book (2020; also staged as a theatre show), and Big Fat Brown Bitch (2023). 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 was honoured with a Distinguished Alumni Award at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington. Her latest collection of poetry is Giving Birth to My Father (2025).

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