What I’m Reading: Michelle Duff

Sunday, 20 April 2025

Michelle Duff is a social issues journalist and author whose first book of fiction, Surplus Women, is out now with Te Herenga Waka University Press. She won the Modern Letters Prize for Fiction in 2023. RRP $35.

All of my thoughts feel half-formed right now, and I feel like this is reflected in how and what I’m reading. I don’t know if it’s because I’m approaching peri-menopause or we’re on the cusp of climate meltdown, or what. Maybe it’s because I got woken yet again by my son crawling into bed at 3am, kicking over my book stack.

The best work I read feels transformative. I love short fiction, and find myself returning to the same stories over and over again, trying to figure out how they did it, pulling on the threads of the story to see how it works. I often reach for Black Marks on the White Page, a compilation edited by Tina Makereti and Witi Ihimaera, mixed-genre stories about how colonialism is being resisted; during my masters in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2023, coming across stories like Slick by Ngāi Tahu writer Nic Low felt like I was being given a secret gift, permission to write and think in a certain way after years of being a journalist and being bound to a particular style (and also, the facts.)

Tiger Work by Ben Okri is a terrifying collection I read recently and probably had more impact on my thinking around the climate crisis than any scientific study. How does fiction manage to do this? It gets under the skin in a way straight lines and data struggle to. That’s what made me interested in writing it. Other things; I stole my 9-year-old’s copy of Under the Mountain by Maurice Gee last night when he was asleep and re-read the whole thing. I’ve never looked at Auckland the same since reading that book, and it makes me beyond happy that my kid is getting the same joy from reading I always have. It is a kind of magic.