Ariana Tikao and Ruby Solly in Conversation

Pepeha Portal is the keenly anticipated debut poetry collection from New Zealand Arts Laureate Ariana Tikao. Rooted in Kai Tahu identity, the collection chronicles a homecoming and offers a moving account of memory, place and belonging.

Born and raised in Otautahi Christchurch, Tikao left the city after the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. In 2023 she was awarded the Ursula Bethell Residency at the University of Canterbury and returned to live in a place that was both deeply familiar and astonishingly new. Written largely during this period, Pepeha Portal is shaped by stories embedded in the landscape - many long erased by colonialism and only recently exposed by cultural, as much as geological, shifts.

Responding to suburban landscapes and tipuna places, personal memory and ancestral voice, Pepeha Portal considers how language, whakapapa and whenua act as portals to belonging.