Pip Adam
Aotearoa rainbow author feature
Pip Adam is the author of four novels: Audition (2023), Nothing to See (2020), The New Animals (2017), and I’m Working on a Building (2013). Her short story collection Everything We Hoped For (2010) won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction in 2011.
Pip’s work has appeared in a number of anthologies and literary journals including Overland (2015), takahē (2014), Fire Dials (2014), Sport (2008–2014), Landfall (2009, 2010), and Hue & Cry (2007–2013).
Pip has an MA in Library and Information Studies and an MA in creative writing from Victoria University of Wellington. In 2012 she completed her PhD, also from Victoria University, supervised by Damien Wilkins. In 2012 she received an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award.
Pip has facilitated writing workshops in universities and other settings, including with people affected by crime in prisons and communities. She was appointed Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence for 2021 at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington’s International Institute of Modern Letters.
Pip also makes the Better off Read podcast, where she talks with authors about writing and reading.
Instagram: @pipadam
Q: Ko wai koe?
Pip: I’m a Tauiwi, Pākehā, Tangata Tiriti, Queer writer. My grandfather is Mexican-American. My grandmother is Romanichal. The rest of my family are from Scotland. My great grandparents came to Waihōpai and lived there until my father and mother moved away in the late 1960s. I was born in Ōtautahi and lived there for the first three years of my life and for a seven-year period in my late twenties. I have also lived in Tāmaki Makaurau and Ōtepoti. Since 2001 I have lived in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. I’m a cis-gendered pansexual woman. My name is Pip Adam.
Q: What inspires you as a rainbow author?
Pip: Being queer is at the heart of everything I do. When I was younger I thought my queerness was completely defined by who I was sleeping with. As a pansexual person this meant I didn’t always feel ‘queer enough’. But today I recognise my queerness is fundamental to who I am in the world. My writing is often a way to work things out that I experience in the ‘real’ world. I’m often confused and infuriated by the systems of power that have so much say over our lives. Writing fiction for me is a way to imagine a new type of world that isn’t controlled by the dominant stories that are reinforced by the people who benefit from them. When I do this I return to the ‘real’ world with a bit more energy to fight for a more hopeful future.
The biggest inspiration for me as a Queer writer is other Queer artists and writers. It was incredibly hard to narrow my list of books down to five. I love reading books by Queer writers. They give me the same hope I feel when I write or take part in political action. But, books don’t need to have a purpose or a moral good. Reading books by Queer writers allows me to laugh, and escape, and feel joy. I need all these things in my life too.
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Everything We Hoped For
Pip Adam
A young mother in shocked contemplation of her new baby and young women in rehab and jail feature in mostly short and oblique stories which echo and connect with cumulative power. A broad range of other characters, including a NZ serviceman returned from active duty in Dili, the employees of a $2 Shop and a vegan couple at a Samoan resort complete an impressive contemporary canvas.
Category: Short Stories, NZ Authors
Representation: Unknown
Content Warnings: Unknown
Published: Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2010
ISBN: 9780864736253
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
I’m Working on a Building
Pip Adam
Everything becomes clearer in reverse- because sometimes, things have to be taken apart to be understood. In the near future, an exact replica of the world’s tallest tower, Dubai’s Burj al Khalifi, is being built on New Zealand’s West Coast. It’s an exercise in economic stimulation and national confidence-building after a run of natural and financial disasters. Catherine is the engineer in charge of making sure it all works. She feels there is something wrong in the plans. Or is there something wrong in her? I’m working on a building follows Catherine from the top of the tower to a geodesic dome in a park in London; from the Grand Lisboa in Macau to student accommodation in Wellington; from a South Auckland theme park to the Pompidou Centre; to reveal the way chance events can undo the best efforts of human beings to plan and build their lives and worlds.
Category: NZ Authors
Representation: Unknown
Content Warnings: Unknown
Published: Victoria University Press, Wellington, New Zealand, 2013
ISBN: 9780864738981
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
The New Animals
Pip Adam
Carla, Sharon and Duey have worked in fashion for longer than they care to remember. For them, there’s nothing new under the sun. They’re Generation X: tired, cynical and sick of being used. Tommy, Cal and Kurt are millennials. They’ve come from nowhere, but with their monied families behind them they’re ready to remake fashion. They represent the new sincere, the anti-irony. Both generations are searching for a way out, an alternative to their messed-up reality. Pip Adam’s new novel walks the streets of Auckland city now, examining the fashion scene, intergenerational tension and modern life with an unflinching eye. From the the wreckage and waste of the 21st century, new animals must emerge.
Category: NZ Authors
Representation: Unknown
Content Warnings: Unknown
Published: Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2017
ISBN: 9781776561162
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
Nothing to See
Pip Adam
It’s 1994.
Peggy and Greta are learning how to live sober. They go to meetings and they ring their support person, Diane. They have just enough money for one Tom Yum between them, but mostly they eat carrot sandwiches. They volunteer at the Salvation Army shop, and sometimes they sleep with men for money. They live with Heidi and Dell, who are also like them.
It’s 2006.
Peggy and Greta have two jobs: a job at a call centre, and a job as a moderator for a website. They’re teaching themselves how to code. Heidi and Dell don’t live together anymore, and Dell keeps getting into trouble. One day, Peggy and Greta turn around and there’s only one of them.
It’s 2018.
Margaret lives next door to Heidi and her family. She has a job writing code that analyses data for a political organisation, and she’s good at it. Every day she checks an obsolete cellphone she found under her bed, waiting for messages. She struggles to stay sober. Then, one day, there are two of them again, both trying to figure out where they have come from. Nothing to See is a compelling, brilliantly original novel about life in the era of surveillance capitalism, when society prefers not to see those who are different, and the line between reality and simulation feels dissolvingly thin.
Category: NZ Authors
Representation: Unknown
Content Warnings: Substance use/abuse, sexual violence, abuse
Published: Victoria University Press, Wellington, New Zealand, 2021
ISBN: 9781776563159
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
Audition
Pip Adam
Audition is hurtling through space towards the event horizon. Squashed immobile into its rooms are three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.
Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their incarcerated former selves. Or are they constructing those selves from memory-scripts that have been implanted in them?
Part science fiction, part social realism, Audition asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – and about how we live with each other’s violences – and imagines a new kind of justice.
Category: NZ Authors, Science Fiction
Representation: Transgender
Content Warnings: Violence, sexual violence, transphobia, homophobia, police violence/brutality, racism
Published: Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, New Zealand, 2023
ISBN: 9781776921683
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
Pip’s rainbow book recommendations!
Killer Rack
Sylvan Spring
In their generous and often euphoric first book, Sylvan Spring is constantly and irresistibly in motion.
These are poems for the sad bitches, the silly billys, the divine transsexuals, the girls who were first to get piercings not in their ears, the ones who dream of dissolving into a river, the Cocteau Twins obsessives, the average bros, the immaculate twinks, the retired popstars turned chicken farmers, and fans of 2001 masterpiece Charlie’s Angels.
‘Exploding in Queer joy, this beautiful, visceral experience of a book is precise and magnificent in its craft, expansive and affecting in its content, somehow intimate and communal in the same breath, wild and compassionate. I fucking love this book and weep with gratitude and excitement every time I remember it’s in the world.’ —Pip Adam
Category: Poetry, NZ Authors
Representation: Transgender
Content Warnings: Unknown
Published: Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, New Zealand, 2024
ISBN: 9781776921256
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
The Surgeon’s Brain
Oscar Upperton
Dr James Barry was many things. He was a pistol-toting dueller, an irascible grudge-holder, a vegetarian, an obsessive cleaner – and a brilliant, humane military surgeon who served throughout the British empire, travelled the world with a small menagerie of animals, and advocated for public health reform. Barry was also a transgender man living in the Victorian era, a time when the term ‘transgender’ was unknown in Western thought … The poems of The Surgeon’s Brain imagine Barry’s inner worlds and the historical and social pressures that he resisted.
Category: Poetry, NZ Authors
Representation: Transgender
Content Warnings: Unknown
Published: Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, New Zealand, 2022
ISBN: 9781776920532
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
Zombabe
I.S. Belle
Two weeks before graduation, Henry “Babe” Simmons is resurrected by his best friend (and secret crush) Eugene “Dude” Marsh. Consequences include freaking out a town who just buried you, an overwhelming hunger for human flesh, and a monster who will step in if you ignore that hunger too long. Thankfully they have Kate Higgins on their side, a whiskey-drinking police chief who is all too eager to get rid of the town riff-raff. Armed with the power of friendship and a vague yet crucial understanding of Latin, Babe and his found family must uncover Bulldeen’s dark secrets and kill the monster for good. Perfect for anyone who wanted the works of Stephen King to be gayer, and for Jennifer’s Body to have a happy ending.
Category: Science Fiction, Horror, Young Adult
Representation: Lesbian, Gay
Content Warnings: Homophobia, violence, gore, abuse, substance use/abuse, racism, sexual violence, fatphobia
Published: Independently, 2022
ISBN: 9780473656645
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
Hamlet: Prince of Robots
M. Darusha Wehm
Elsinore Robotics is on the cusp of a breakthrough-the company is poised to create the first humanoid androids powered by true artificial intelligence. Their only rival, Norwegian Technologies, lost a publicly streamed contest between their flagship model, Fortinbras, and Elsinore’s HAM(let) v.1. But when the first Hamlet model is found irreparably deactivated, the apparent victim of wild malware, the field of consumer cybernetics is thrown wide open. However, Hamlet v.1’s memories were not entirely lost in the accident.
Hamlet v.2 swears to avenge his progenitor, but is plagued by the aftereffects of integrating Old Hamlet’s backup into his own neural matrix. Beset by doubts about whether his feelings are truly his own, he worries his love for his boyfriend, Horatio, is an illusion, all the while driven by a consuming need for revenge. While he has a method, there is a madness in it, and Hamlet’s actions will leave no corner of Elsinore unscathed.
A beat-by-beat retelling of the Shakespeare classic, Hamlet, Prince of Robots grapples with conscience, ambition, and pain, and what it means to be, or not to be, human.
Category: Science Fiction, NZ Author
Representation: Gay
Content Warnings: Character death, violence
Published: in potentia press, 2023
ISBN: 9780473638870
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
kitten
Olive Nuttall
Rosemary, a trans girl, has many conflicting qualities. She’ s super smart but flawed, polyamorous but timid, promiscuous but inexperienced. She’ s surprising, and surprised by herself. A call that Rosemary’ s grandmother is dying puts her on the bus from Te Whanganui-a-Tara back to Kirikiriroa. There, with her mother, half-sister, and other family and friends, she remembers the damage of her past. And then Thorn – Rosemary’ s long-distance daddy – shows up. Often wildly funny, and with a tender, matter-of-fact closeness to the enigmatic Rosemary, kitten has the wisdom that nothing in life is straightforwardly good or bad. It is a novel for readers who want to be seen and understood, or to see and understand. For all its darkness and hurt, kitten is a wholesome and consoling love story.
Category: New Adult, NZ Authors
Representation: Transgender, Bisexual
Content Warnings: Transphobia, sexual violence, substance use/abuse, sexual activity, violence, abuse, suicide
Published: Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, New Zealand, 2024
ISBN: 9781776921263
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)