Toby Buck is an award-winning writer and essayist working across culture, identity, material life, and ideas.
His work spans longform essays, journalism, profiles, and cultural criticism that explores how people make meaning in the world.
Based in Amsterdam, he writes for international publications.
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↓ Featured Essays & Longform
Culture, identity, work, and meaning - the intersections of personal experience and society.
Herman & The Serpent
The extraordinary story of a friend’s encounter with a serial killer. Character and form bend at the edge of crime writing.
Happiness?
A critical exploration of the UN World Happiness Report. Can global wellbeing really be quantified? Or do current metrics obscure more than they reveal.
Gabrielle
A human-centred feature on Pacific cyclone Gabrielle.
Front line reporting where empathy has to come first.
‘Profound writing - full of persuasive visual detail, with an incredible ear for everyday speech.’
Emma Kneale, Landfall Journal Editor
‘Brash, unapologetic and completely confident writing. It takes a series of risks, almost sinks itself, and somehow gets away with it. I kept returning to it.’
Charlotte Grimshaw, Mansfield Award Judge
↓ Profiles, Interviews & Reportage
People, practice, voice, and context.
Oceania in Venice
A profile conversation with Yuki Kihara on Paradise Camp.
Performance and the politics of representation at the Venice Biennale.
Portable Miracles
A look at the inception of the New Zealand Poet Laureate programme.
Illuminating the cultural logic behind national literature platforms.
Out of the Box
A cultural portrait of a beachside DIY Coffin Club reveals community, mortality and happiness intertwined in unexpected local rituals.
↓ Wine, Food & Material Culture
Food not as lifestyle, but as social practice.
How taste, labour and tradition shape the way we live.
Regeneration
An essay-style exploration, “A World Upside Down” celebrates wine, soil, culture and perspective in a piece that resists easy categorisation.
JR Prize Winner
Harvesters
A vivid portrayal of seasonal harvest workers in Hawke’s Bay - labour, landscape and the often invisible hands behind food production.
Big Red
A speculative essay on how New Zealand winemakers might be re-imagining a new “big red” identity. What does that say about changes in category, value and tradition?
A Jurassic Art
An interview with Sam Neill that goes beyond celebrity to interrogate lifelong craft, family and the sensory poetics of viniculture.
↓ Commentary / Short Form
Provisional, responsive. Often exploratory.
The Walls & The Garden
Memoir that lets personal details ripple into larger questions of memory and belonging.
jancisrobinson.com
Fresh Claret
An ode to Cabernet Sauvignon.
Notes of home, place, and blackberries.
From the most collaborative of varietals.