Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on Place from Aotearoa New Zealand

This collection of personal essays, a first of its kind, re-imagines the idea of place for an emerging generation of readers and writers. It offers glimpses into where we are now and how that feels, and opens up the range and kinds of stories we can conceive of telling about living here. Contributors include Tony Ballantyne, Sally Blundell, Alex Calder, Annabel Cooper, Tim Corballis, Martin Edmond, Ingrid Horrocks, Lynn Jenner, Cherie Lacey, Tina Makereti, Harry Ricketts, Jack Ross, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Giovanni Tiso, Ian Wedde, Lydia Wevers, and Ashleigh Young.

‘To investigate something properly we need all three: archives, dreams, memories. [...] And so the liberation of a collection like this becomes possible.’ —Martin Edmond

Ingrid Horrocks is the author of Travelling with Augusta: 1835 and 1999 (2003), two collections of poetry, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility 1784–1814, (2017),  the memoir Where We Swim (2021) and the short story collection All Her Lives (2025). She did a PhD at Princeton University and teaches creative nonfiction and English at Massey University, Wellington. 

Cherie Lacey received her PhD (Film) from the University of Auckland and MA (Literature) from Victoria University of Wellington. Her research explores the ways in which place affects our psyche, drawing primarily from psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory. Cherie lectures in Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.