This Paper Boat

This Paper Boat
Gregory Kan

A rich and fractured first book in which two authors, their families and their many ghosts navigate oceans, forests, gardens, dreams and houses in New Zealand, Singapore and China.

This Paper Boat follows the author as he traces his own history through the lives and written fragments of Iris Wilkinson (aka Robin Hyde), of his parents and of their parents.

He explores Robin Hyde’s old territories, still dripping with the past – the tide pool at Island Bay with its shrimp and driftwood, the garden at Laloma with its crushed lemon leaves. He listens to the stories of his parents and their parents, the eels and milk, frangipani trees, drains and barbed wire of their childhoods. He remembers a jungle of his own; he searches for ghosts in the water. While stumbling across irreparable fractures between worlds, the author uncovers the permission to have beautiful and imperfect plans.

Gregory Kan is a writer based in Auckland. His first manuscript, a series of poems, was shortlisted for the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Prize in 2013. Kan’s most recent series of poems, ‘A holding apart of air’, features in the catalogue for the exhibition what is a life? by the painter Kim Pieters, at the Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, and his work is featured or forthcoming in literary journals such as brief, Hue & Cry, otoliths, Percutio,Sport and Turbine.

Kan was also featured in – and gave the name to – Paper Boat: Moments in the Life of a Book (video.lumiere.net.nz/paper-boat/), a short film directed by Alex Mitcalfe Wilson.

His essay Borrowed Lungs was included in Tell You What: Great New Zealand Nonfiction 2015 (AUP). He currently works as a web developer and systems engineer and other interests include the architecture of fried cheese snacks, and power.

The book publishes 22 February 2016, Auckland University Press, RRP $24.99, and more information is here.

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