Kōrero
Verb: The Sell-Me-On-It Slideshow Showdown

It’s the ultimate challenge, selling your hottest take/most unpopular opinion/nichest interest to a crowd ready to either get on your side or toss you out at a moment’s notice. Four brave souls are prepared to take on the challenge, armed only with their slideshow and the projector remote. In this showdown, Saraid de Silva, Dani Yorukouva, Miriama Aoake (Ngaati Mahuta, Ngāti Hinerangi, Waikato-Tainui) and Bryant Apolonio (Australia) take on the challenge to win over the crowd and come out on top. King of Games Nick Ascroft jumps in as host to keep things nice and fair.

Presented as part of Verb Readers and Writers Festival 2024, for which Satellites is a supporting partner.

Nick Ascroft is a poet and Scrabble champion, that is, a real douchebag. His most recent book The Stupefying (THWUP, 2022) was named the poetry collection of that year by Newsroom. Harry Ricketts said that it had a 'shoulder-squirming tone' and another reviewer called him a 'serious comedian', both of which have a sucker-punch vibe. Nick’s adapted play-slash-poem for children Betsy Balloon had a development performance at the 2023 Loemis festival and will be back.

Bryant Apolonio is a writer and critic based in Sydney, Australia. His work has appeared in places like Westerly, Mascara Literary Review, Liminal and New Australian Fiction. His short fiction has won the Deborah Cass Prize, the Liminal Fiction Prize and the Overland Fair Australia Prize. He is working on his first novel.

Miriama Aoake (Ngaati Mahuta, Ngaati Hinerangi, Waikato-Tainui) is a social anthropologist, writer, and PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her thesis is an ethnography of place, and explores the everyday machinations whānau Māori are taking to make the good life possible. Anchored in the ‘golden triangle’ of Raahui Pookeka [Huntly]—the Taniwharau Rugby League Club, Waahi Paa and its papakainga—these experiences tally strategies of humour, labour, risk and care used to make sense of life ‘somewhere between laughter and tears’ (Jackson 1995:127).

Dani Yourukova is a queer Wellington writer who completed their studies in classics, philosophy and English literature before going on to do an MA at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Their poems, essays and reviews have been published in places such as Starling, Sweet Mammalian, Bad Apple, takahē, Turbine | Kapohau and The Spinoff. Their debut poetry collection, Transposium, was published by Auckland University Press in October 2023.

Born in Kirikiriroa, Saraid de Silva (she/her) is a Sri Lankan/Pākehā writer and arts worker based in Tāmaki Makaurau. In 2024 Saraid’s debut novel Amma was released in Aotearoa, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Saraid has formerly worked as a journalist, producing three seasons of the podcast and documentary series Conversations With My Immigrant Parents for Radio New Zealand, and works as a TV writer.