$60,000 Prize Awarded for Poem Imagining the Killing of Early European Explorer

New Zealand’s governing ACT Party has criticised a decision by Creative NZ to award a poet a NZ$60,000 literary prize for a poem that imagines a violent attack on early explorer Captain James Cook. The Christchurch-based Tusiata Avia published the poem in 2020 to mark the 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival in New Zealand. Creative NZ recently announced Ms. Avia to be the winner of the poetry section of the 2023 Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement. The poem imagines a group of brown-skinned women taking revenge on the seafarer, or white men like him, “who might be thieves or rapists or kidnappers or murderers.”...