Nafanua Purcell Kersel: 'It starts with the spoken word'

Nafanua Purcell Kersel: 'It starts with the spoken word'

Nafanua Purcell Kersel, who won the poetry prize at this year’s Ockham Book Awards for Black Sugarcane, her first book. “The stories in Black Sugarcane were always in me. They’re stories about my family, they’re stories about my life experience, but they’re not necessarily just mine. I didn’t expect that I would have an outlet for these stories, and that the outlet would be poetry.” (Photo: Ebony Lamb) Nafanua Purcell Kersel (Satupa‘itea, Faleāl…