"New Zealand writers have always suffered from what is sometimes called 'the tyranny of distance.' Rudyard Kipling called Invercargill, our southernmost city, 'the last lamppost in the world.' That distance was often felt in psychic ways—and perhaps still is—but the geographical fact was also pretty serious. Our poets had almost no readers outside New Zealand. How could their books, those solid things, find their way past the trade cartels and across the miles—twelve thousand of them—to the other side of the world?" Bill Manhire • World Literature Today

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