Full text of Vaughan Rapatahana's Tapa Notebook [PDF: 9.8MB]
Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa) commutes between Hong Kong SAR, Philippines and Aotearoa New Zealand – when Covid allows! He is widely published across several genres in Māori and English and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian. His collection Atonement was nominated for a National Book Award in Philippines in 2016. He also won the inaugural international Proverse Poetry Prize in 2016 and was represented in Best New Zealand Poems in the following year. He participated in World Poetry Recital Night, Kuala Lumpur, September 2019, and Poetry International, the Southbank Centre, London in October 2019 – in the launch of Poems from the Edge of Extinction and in the reading presentation titled Incendiary Art: the power of disruptive poetry. Vaughan’s poem tahi kupu anake is included in the presentation by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas to the United Nations Forum on Minority Issues in Geneva in November 2019. Rapatahana has a PhD from the University of Auckland on the work of English author Colin Wilson and frequently writes about and lectures on him.
Vaughan writes:
I found the Tapa Notebook of immense value as I travelled back to Hong Kong SAR and Philippines in 2017. I was conscious of the need to write about literary events and readings that I attended and participated in both countries, but at the same time I found myself scrawling in my execrable longhand, new poems in the notebook. In effect, writing about poetry and literature per se led me to create more of both. At the same time that I was overseas – rather, my wife Leticia and I were – I was also working on poetry resource books, and language critiques that were later published, so the notebook is full of references to all of this material.
Links
Photo: Vaughan Rapatahana @ Peel Street Poetry (Hong Kong 2017)
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