Latest news with #TheSilence
Newsroom
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsroom
Ockhams: oldest writer ever to make shortlist
At 92, CK Stead is the oldest writer to ever contest a prize at the national book awards – probably. I think so anyway. His collection In The Half Light of a Dying Day is shortlisted for the $12,000 poetry prize awarded tomorrow night (Wednesday, May 14) at the Ockham awards. No one quite as ancient as the sage of Parnell is leaping out, to borrow an inappropriately physical metaphor, in the records of past winners dating back to 1968. The closest in age appears to be his great friend and neighbour, Allen Curnow. He was 90 when he won the poetry prize for The Bells of Saint Babel's in 2001. He died that same year. The longevity of poets; Stead still swims out regularly to a buoy at Kohimarama in Auckland, still reads and writes and thinks. I asked him for a comment. He emailed, 'Literary prizes are commercially inevitable, nice if you win, but largely a nonsense. Athletics are better. If you win even by only 100th of a second, still you have won. Literary preferences can only be confirmed by Judge Time, and even she can be challenged. 'I've often been relieved to find one of my books not on the long list, because it means I'm not in the spotlight. The worst is to be on the longlist and go no further. I've had that – I think I've had every possibility…I think the prize that pleased me most here was the Sarah Broom Prize for Poetry because it commemorates such a fine poet who died young.' Stead won that prize in 2014. He told Stuff, 'It's reassuring at my age to be told that you are still in business.' Eleven years on, and he is still very much in business; his shortlisting for In The Half Light of a Dying Day marks the fifth decade he has been up for a national award, after being judged third place in the 1972 book awards for his novel Smith's Dream, winning the poetry prize in 1976 for Quesada, winning the fiction prize in 1985 for All Visitors Ashore, winning the fiction prize again, in 1995, for The Singing Whakapapa, and winning the anthology prize for his Collected Poems in 2009. He is shortlisted for this year's poetry prize alongside Emma Neale, Robert Sullivan, and Richard von Sturmer. Anna Jackson has described In The Half Light of a Dying Day as 'a late masterpiece'; her compliment seems entirely apt. The Silence In the undertaker's parlour today Catullus you wore your new hearing aids to listen beside finely refurbished Kezia to the Silence. She lay there in her plain wood coffin no more serious than you but focussed wearing that dark grey skirt we'd chosen, red-brown silk scarf, black trousers and black-shined shoes so small they touched the heart. Not a pin was dropped, not a tear fell: you and she Catullus were elsewhere, otherwhere nowhere. 'The Silence' is taken with kind permission from In The Half Light of a Dying Day by CK Stead (Auckland University Press, $25), shortlisted for the poetry prize at the 2025 Ockhams, and available in bookstores nationwide. The book is a sequence of poems leading to the death of the author's wife, Kay, in August 2023. All the poems were written in that year of illness and grief.
Korea Herald
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
DMZ Docs showcases Park Soo-nam's unflinching lens
Zainichi filmmaker's lifetime documenting Japanese wartime atrocities takes center stage The DMZ International Documentary Film Festival (DMZ Docs) will mark the 80th anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule with a retrospective of Zainichi Korean filmmaker Park Soo-nam's complete works. This first-ever comprehensive showcase runs online Feb. 28-March 28 and will make all five of her documentaries freely accessible via the docuVoDA platform. A second-generation Korean Japanese, or Zainichi, Park has devoted her career to chronicling the forgotten victims of Japanese wartime atrocities. Born in 1935 in Mie Prefecture and raised in Yokohama, she made her directorial debut in the 1980s, focusing on the narratives of Korean survivors of the atomic bombs, military sex slavery and forced labor. "In 2025, the 80th anniversary of liberation, we continue standing with the comfort women who suffered as sex slaves, and we remain outraged by the exploitation of forced laborers," said DMZ Docs Programmer Kang Jin-seok. "Yet we often overlook how these histories survive through documentation. Park's five films powerfully demonstrate how records create memory." Featured films at the retrospective include: Park's debut work "The Other Hiroshima: Korean A-bomb Victims Tell Their Story" (1986), which captures testimonies of Korean atomic bomb victims; "Song of Arirang – Voices from Okinawa" (1991), which documents the Koreans forced into military service and sexual slavery during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa; "Nuchigafu" (2012), which unearths war memories previously kept silent; and "The Silence" (2016), winner of the White Goose Award at the 8th DMZ Docs. "The Silence" documents the survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery during World War II, including Bae Bong-gi, who first brought the issue to public attention in the 1980s, and Lee Ok-sun, who was imprisoned at age 17 in a Manchurian "comfort station." The documentary resonated deeply in both Korea and Japan for moving beyond mere documentation to examine the power structures that silenced the victims. Park's latest work, "Voices of the Silenced" (2024), created with her daughter Park Ma-ui, revisits 30,000 meters of 16mm footage Park has accumulated throughout her career. The Korean Independent Film Association named it last year's top independent film. The 17th DMZ International Documentary Film Festival runs Sept. 11-17, 2025, in Goyang and Paju in Gyeonggi Province. The festival, established in 2009 and situated less than 20 kilometers away from the heavily fortified inter-Korean border, focuses on documentaries promoting "peace, coexistence and reconciliation." Filmmakers can submit entries until April 30 for the International Competition and May 23 for the Korean Competition, with various categories offering prizes ranging from 3 million won ($2,100) to 15 million won ($10,500).
