WORD Christchurch

16/06/2026

Happy National Volunteer Week to all who celebrate! We are certainly celebrating at WORD - we couldn’t host a festival so full of manaakitanga without our volunteer team. They are the ones doing the heavy lifting (sometimes literally!) to keep our events smooth and simple for our artists, audience members and core team.

Thank you so much, volunteers!

14/06/2026

Next Monday is the shortest day of the year, the perfect time to celebrate National Flash Fiction Day! Flash fiction are tiny pieces of fiction: just 100 words or less to pack a punch and tell a story.

WORD friends Dietrich Soakai, Gail Zing and Josiah Morgan will be some of the talented writers at Tūranga for a free celebration of some of Aotearoa’s best flash fiction. There will be kai and readings. Toi Ōtautahi and Christchurch City Libraries have all the details.

12/06/2026

Calling all Ōtautahi booklovers! Our Pātaka Pukapuka is in need of a restock. If your shelves are starting to burst, and you’re feeling generous, please bring down some pukapuka and share the stories you adore with a friendly book-loving stranger. You might find your next read while you’re there.

You’ll find WORD’s Pātaka Pukapuka in the Performing Arts Plaza at 156 Armagh Street, next to The Piano. With thanks to He Waka Tapu for donating us this little library!

11/06/2026

Have you been into Tūranga’s newest exhibition? Ahakoa He Iti opened on 6 June and will run until late July. The name comes from the whakataukī: ‘ahakoa he iti, he pounamu’, meaning ‘although it’s small, it’s precious'.

The exhibition platforms items kept safe, but often out of sight, at our central library.

Head along to Te Pito Huarewa Gallery, which is on Level 2 at Tūranga. Thank you to Christchurch City Libraries for supplying these images.

09/06/2026

04/06/2026

Join Marcus (Director of The Piano) and Steph (Executive Director of WORD) for the house tour. The Piano has been WORD’s home base since it opened 10 years ago, and we love it. 💚

03/06/2026

There’s nothing warmer than an evening of poetry from local legends and first time readers alike. Don your coats and scarves and enjoy the spoken word this June. Ngā mihi to Claudia Hertz-Jardine for collating these events in her monthly digital Lit Scene Zine.

02/06/2026

Featuring some WORD friends (and potentially a Traitor?!), June is an chocka month for readers and book lovers. Find more details about each event by googling the author or following the tags.

28/05/2026

“There’s always a sense of curiosity here, we’ve never wanted to be a bookshop that only stocks the obvious titles. People come here because they know they’ll find books they didn’t even know they were looking for.”

If you’ve ever as much as window shopped, or regularly find yourself luxuriating in Scorpio Books' thoughtfully curated shelves, you will resonate with Scorpio’s head book buyer, Bel Monypenny’s kōrero.

Happy, happy, happy 50 years, Scorpio! We can’t wait to celebrate with you over King's Birthday weekend and beyond. Make sure to keep an eye on their socials so you don’t miss any of the goodness!

Images: First slide: B&W image from The Press 1983. Second slide: Colour image: Alex Adank, B&W Image, photographer unknown: 1989.