With her trademark visual wit, our buddy Mophead unravels the knots that keep us up at night.

‘What do you do if nothing is right – not at home, at school, anywhere?’
‘What if people don’t like me?’
‘What if your own ideas stink?’
‘How do I hug my dad?’ 

One morning, Selina wakes up with a twisting, tangling, knotty problem. It takes over everyone and everything – work, kids, life, the lot. How can she get out of a knot this tight?

Then she remembers: kids write to her all the time – they ask some of life’s toughest questions. Can she help them through their knots? And through helping them, can she find a way out of her own?

In this self-help give-it-a-go moppy-mayhem-filled workbook-that’s-all-about-play, join Selina as she scribbles and draws and writes her way out of the darkness – and invites you to take out a pen.

A book for readers from eight to eighty and for anyone in a dark place, no matter what knot you’ve got.

Author and Illustrator

Dr Selina Tusitala Marsh is an Auckland-based Pasifika poet of Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, Scottish and French descent. She was the first Pacific Islander to graduate with a PhD in English from the University of Auckland where she is now an associate professor in the English Department, specialising in Pasifika literature. Her first collection, the bestselling Fast Talking PI, won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry in 2010. Marsh represented Tuvalu at the London Olympics Poetry Parnassus event in 2012; her work has been translated into Ukrainian and Spanish and has appeared in numerous forms live in schools, museums, parks, billboards, as well as print and online literary journals. As Commonwealth Poet (2016), she composed and performed for the Queen at Westminster Abbey. She was New Zealand’s Poet Laureate from 2017–2019. In 2019 she was awarded a Humanities Aronui Medal and was elected a Ngā Ahurei a Te Apārangi Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. She won the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year at the 2020 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults for her first children's book, Mophead: How Your Difference Makes a Difference.