Landfall (journal)

Landfall Tauraka (formerly Landfall) is New Zealand's oldest extant literary magazine. It is published biannually by Otago University Press. As of 2025, each issue is a paperback volume of about 200 pages. The journal features new fiction and poetry, biographical and critical essays, cultural commentary, and book reviews. Its companion website, The Landfall Tauraka Review, publishes monthly long-form literary reviews.

Landfall was founded and first edited by New Zealand poet Charles Brasch. It was described by Peter Simpson in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (2006) as "the most important and long-lasting journal in New Zealand's literature". Historian Michael King said that during the twentieth century, "Landfall would more than any other single organ promote New Zealand voices in literature and, at least for the duration of Brasch's editorship (1947–66), publish essays, fiction and poetry of the highest standard".

Denis Glover, of Caxton Press, visited Brasch in London while on leave from naval service during World War II, and it was then the two "discussed the idea for a new, professionally produced literary journal in New Zealand". Other periodicals in existence at that time were smaller and irregularly published, such as Book, edited by Anton Vogt, and also published by Caxton Press. Brasch had held the ambition of publishing "a substantial literary journal" in New Zealand for at least 15 years.

The title Landfall was likely to have been inspired by Landfall in Unknown Seas, a poem written by Allen Curnow in 1942 and set to music by his friend Douglas Lilburn in 1944. The poem records the arrival of the first Europeans in New Zealand. It is one of the best-known of all New Zealand poems. Tom Weston noted in 1985 that in its early years, "Landfall in Unknown Seas" was "something of a motto": "There was a sense of discovery, of sorting out a place [for New Zealand literature] in this world."

The magazine was established in 1947 and published by Caxton Press, with Brasch as the editor-in-chief for the first two decades. Glover and Leo Bensemann acted as designers, typographers and printers. For its first 46 years (174 issues), Landfall was a quarterly of 76 pages (with some variation) with a brown paper cover, printed in two colours (and four colours from 1979 onwards). 800 copies of the first issue were printed, and Brasch later said they sold out "almost at once". An early review by Oliver Duff in the New Zealand Listener was positive but predicted that the magazine would last no more than a year.

Landfall was New Zealand's leading literary journal during Brasch's editorship, and significantly important to New Zealand's emerging literary culture in the 1950s and 1960s. The journal also had pages dedicated to coverage of the arts in general and public affairs. Brasch devoted himself to editing the journal on a full-time basis, and applied high and exacting standards to the work published. At times, Brasch's high standards led to friction, with some young writers resenting what they saw as his inflexibility and solemnity, and calling the journal elitist. He did, however, encourage and promote the work of new writers in whom he saw promise.

Brasch ensured that the journal not only published poems, short stories and reviews, but also published paintings, photographs and other visual art, and provided commentary on the arts, theatre, music, architecture, and aspects of public affairs. His vision for the journal was that it would be "distinctly of New Zealand without being parochial", and he viewed the likely audience as the educated public: "Everyone for whom literature and the arts are a necessity of life." Virtually all prominent writers in New Zealand at that time were published in Landfall; Janet Frame wrote in her autobiography An Angel At My Table that her early impression of the magazine was that "if you didn't appear in Landfall then you could scarcely call yourself a writer".

At the peak of the magazine's popularity, in the early 1960s, around 1600 copies were being printed of each issue. Brasch recalled that the peak sales figure was 2000 copies for an issue published in his last year of editing the paper, despite almost no advertising. In 1962, Brasch published Landfall Country: Work from Landfall, 1947–61, an anthology of works published in Landfall. Writers and poets featured included Maurice Gee, Frank Sargeson, C.K. Stead, Ruth Dallas, Curnow, James K. Baxter and Fleur Adcock, and there were reproductions of paintings, sculptures and photographs by various New Zealand artists including Colin McCahon, Evelyn Page and others. It also included twenty-nine pages of selections from the editorial section written by Brasch himself.