Transcript
The thread of Gina Cole's work in Black Ice Matters talks about the hot and cold temperature extremes across countries, through time and in feelings.
Her writing has been described as "Fijian-infused queer-inflected and crafted with legal precision".
Of Fijian, Scottish and Welsh heritage with a Masters of Creative Writing, Ms Cole's characters are inspired by the islands.
"A lot of my characters are Fijiian. Some of them are from other islands like Tuvalu and Rabi which is an island off the coast of Fiji where people were resettled from Kiribati. So they were taken from Kiribati and resettled onto Rabi and the people on Rabi were resettled to another island."
Scott Hamilton has written and published on a variety of topics including Tongan art, the Pacific slave trade, kava drinking, and Aotearoa history.
He won the Auckland Mayoral Literary Grant in 2015 and the following year he published The Stolen Island while on a Literary Residency.
"It is difficult to find something that makes sense in 10 minutes. The story of the Artans who were enslaved and the search for survivors of slavery is a long and tangled story and it is not a story that is finished."
American Brit Bennett achieved fame with her 2014 essay I Don't Know What to Do With Good White People and wrote for publications such as Paris Review and Jezebel.
Her debut novel, The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller and the story Ms Bennett shared was about a mother abandoning her baby on the shores of the Pacific ocean.
"I grew up in the church so there is this church background in the book and I grew up on this beach town that was this very culturally diverse place and it is a place that not many Americans really know about and so it has been fun to be able to travel around America and other places and talk about the book."
Samoan author, Courtney Sina Meredith, launched her first book of poetry, Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick, at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair but read from her latest book, Tails of the Taniwha about a Pacific person visiting the Tate Museum in Europe.
"The younger one talked so loud I can't wait to go home to see if I do look African or like an Indian or a Japanese. You were right Nafanua there is only me that at the Tate I saw nothing but myself. Thank you."
She says she hopes to see more Pacific people getting published because tales from the islands provide a unique perspective on Pasifika experiences.
