Re-mapping the Archive

The third event of the ‘Living Archives’ series explores the presence of archives as records of individuals and communities. Absences across archives, marginalized spaces, and attitudes towards languages will be explored. Poet, novelist, and memoirist Marilyn Bowering’s More Richly on Earth: A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod traces the life of the obscure 17^th-century Gaelic poet who was exiled and linked to witchcraft. Through misty journeys in the Scottish Hebrides, Bowering weaves rare facts about McLeod’s impact and legacy while ruminating on her own personal journeys as a writer. 

In her collection Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonized, Māori scholar and poet Alice Te Punga Somerville writes of love, anger, and alienation in a collection that dismantles the convention of italicizing foreign words. Poems intricately explore how individuals, cultures, and objects belonging to Aotearoa, wider Pacific, and Indigenous peoples are seen and treated in spaces such as archives and workplaces. Furthermore, Te Punga Somerville’s project ‘Writing the New World’ explores Indigenous engagements with periodicals in the twentieth-century Pacific, and the different forms that archives can take.

Dr Theresa Muñoz is a Canadian poet living in Edinburgh, Scotland, with a PhD from the University of Glasgow. She has published one collection of poetry, Settle, which was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. Her second collection Archivum, an exploration of what it means to engage with archival artefacts, is published by Pavilion Poetry (2025) and was nominated in the Saltire Literary Prizes 2025. She has been awarded the Scottish Muriel Spark Centenary Award, Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, Creative Scotland Award, and shortlisted for The Kavya Prize and a Sky Arts Royal Society of Literature Writers Award. She has directed several literary initiatives in the UK, including the Newcastle Poetry Festival and the James Berry Poetry Prize.

Marilyn Bowering is a Winnipeg-born novelist and poet who grew up in Victoria, BC. She is the author of five novels, including the NYT Notable Book, To All Appearances a Lady, and the Orange-Prize shortlisted Visible Worlds. A new novel, The Unfinished World, was published in 2025. Marilyn’s recent book of non-fiction, More Richly in Earth: A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod, is part memoir and part literary investigation of a 17th-century female Scottish Gaelic bard. It was nominated for the Saltire Prize and is a finalist for the Hubert Evans Prize and The Victoria Book Prize. Marilyn lives with her family on the traditional lands of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples near Victoria.

Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori: Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) is a scholar, poet, irredentist and māmā. Currently based on Musqueam territory in Canada, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia, her scholarly publications include Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania (2012) and 250 Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook (2021). Her collection of poetry, Always Italicise: how to write while colonised (AUP 2022) won Ockham NZ Awards 2023 Best Book of Poetry.