Every year, in honour of Allen Curnow, a generous friend of the festival, Going West invites an established New Zealand poet to read. Curnow once wrote that by ‘simply sailing in a new direction you could enlarge the world’; and this year we celebrate the power of words to spread ideas and enlarge the world of those that read or hear them.

The 2018 Curnow Reader is Serie Barford, a remarkable poet with deep ties to West Auckland and a long-standing connection with the Going West Writers Festival. Of mixed Samoan-Palagi descent, much of Serie’s writing explores what she has described as ‘the stories within us and how we sustain relationships both within and between visible and invisible worlds’. She will share with us poems from across her writing life – and no doubt enlarge the world in the process.

Serie Bradford’s latest collection, Entangled Islands is a mixture of poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Serie was awarded the Seresin Landfall Residency in 2011 and is a recipient of the Michael King Writers' Centre 2018 Pasifika residency.