Book Launch: The Gum Trees of Kerikeri by Lynn Jenner

Join OUP at the University Book Shop Otago for the Dunedin launch of The Gum Trees of Kerikeri! To be launched by David Eggleton.

Winner of the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award, The Gum Trees of Kerikeri by Lynn Jenner is a beautifully crafted and quietly compelling tour de force. 

Please RSVP to publicity@otago.ac.nz

About the book

Grounded in the natural world and the community of the land the speaker lives on – an area in the far north of Aotearoa New Zealand that was once a kauri forest – the collection weaves observations and encounters from daily life with musings on societal and environmental issues, memory, history, art and culture. The result is a deeply observant, reflective collection on that most challenging of constants: change.

Across 56 finely tuned prose poems, Jenner’s technical restraint and precision allow her explorations to unfold with calm, measured power. She draws connections between people, place and creative practice, examining how time, art and memory shape our sense of belonging. The Gum Trees of Kerikeri is a thoughtful, sensitively balanced work that shows how close observation can uncover new understandings of the world and our own circumstances – even as the speaker sometimes doubts that any of it is useful in a world speeding towards catastrophe.

Find out more here

About the author

Lynn Jenner is the author of Peat (OUP, 2019), a collection of essays and glossaries which consider the construction of the Kāpiti Expressway in the light of aesthetic and ecological ideas drawn from the writings of Charles Brasch. Lynn’s first book Dear Sweet Harry (AUP, 2010) won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry prize and her second book Lost and Gone Away was shortlisted in the Non-Fiction category of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Lynn lives in Waipapa, near Kerikeri.