Book Launch | Surplus Women by Michelle Duff

Name: Book Launch | Surplus Women by Michelle Duff
Start: 2025-04-11T18:00:00+12:00
Location: Unity Books Wellington

Schedule

Fri, 11 Apr, 2025 at 06:00 pm

UTC+12:00

Location

Unity Books Wellington | Wellington, WG

Please join Te Herenga Waka University Press for the launch of Surplus Women, a remarkable debut book of short stories by Michelle Duff. Award-winning author Tina Makereti will be doing the launch honours and we will also hear from the amazing Emily Writes.

💃 Friday 11 April, 6pm
💃 Unity Books Wellington
💃 All welcome!
Jess is the only one in her group who hasn’t lost her virginity. Genevieve is being held captive in a dug-out with her gymnastics nemesis from 40 years ago. At night, Jade absorbs catcalls like Mario powering up on mushrooms. From heaven, the Dream Team data-analyses human destinies while worrying about their job security. As Whetū and Sia race to the hospital in the rain, Whetū remembers another night that changed everything.
This is a collection of stories about women in past, present and future Aotearoa. Michelle Duff’s cast of hungry teenage girls, top detectives who forget to buy milk, frustrated archivists, duplicitous real estate agents, and ‘surplus women’ are all as vivid as wafts of Impulse from a backpack in the 90s. These stories move nimbly from realism to comic overdrive, from the outlandish to the simply true, with characters reappearing from new angles. As they meditate on power and patriarchy, love and bad decisions, these stories remind us of the sweet dreams we used to have and how it feels to wake up from them.
About the author: Michelle Duff is an award-winning journalist and writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. She was the winner of the 2023 Fiction Prize from the International Institute of Modern Letters. She is recognised in Aotearoa for her in-depth reporting and feature writing in outlets such as Stuff, New Zealand Geographic and 1News, and globally in The Guardian, The Melbourne Age and The Sunday Times.