Landfall is New Zealand's foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, as well as biographical and critical essays, reviews and cultural commentary. Landfall 240 also features the winner of the 2020 Landfall Essay Competition as well as judges comments.

Charles Brasch (1909-1973) was the founder and first editor of "Landfall," New Zealand's premier journal of literature and ideas. Born in Dunedin, he grew up to be at home in the literature, art, and architecture of Europe, but returned to devote his life to the arts in his own country--as editor, critic, collector, and patron. Brasch's vocation, however, was to be a poet. As he said in his memoir "Indirections," in writing poems he "discovered New Zealand ... because New Zealand lived in me as no other country could live, part of myself as I was part of it, the world I breathed and wore from birth, my seeing and my language." This selection of Brasch's poetry shows his journey of discovery as he learned by reading poets such as Rilke, W.B. Yeats, and Robert Graves to find his own voice as "a citizen of the English language."

"This second of three volumes of Charles Brasch's journals covers 1945 to 1957, beginning with his return to New Zealand after World War II to establish a literary quarterly. The journals cover the discussions that preceded Landfall and the first decade of his distinguished editorship, a role that brought Brasch into contact with New Zealand's leading artists and intelligentsia. His frank and often detailed descriptions of these people - including Frank Sargeson, A.R.D. Fairburn, Keith Sinclair, Eric McCormick, James Bertram, John Beaglehole, Fred and Evelyn Page, Alistair Campbell, Toss and Edith Woollaston, Denis Glover, Allen Curnow, Leo Bensemann, Ngaio Marsh, Colin McCahon, James K. Baxter, Janet Frame, Ruth Dallas and many others - are among the highlights of the book. Unmarried and longing for intimacy, Brasch also writes with great candour about his relationships with Rose Archdall, Rodney Kennedy and Harry Scott, revealing a side of himself that has not been known about before. Central to Brasch's life was the vocation of poetry. He writes revealingly about his own work, and also about his love of nature and the outdoors. The book ends with his visit to Europe in 1957, which confirmed his sense that New Zealand had become for him 'a centre & a world'" -- Back cover.