Perfectly Themselves: Horses in the Human World
When Abby Letteri first encountered free-living horses, she realised that her whole life she’d been looking at horses without actually seeing them. Wild horses spend their lives building and maintaining social bonds, moving together in synchrony, their communication constant and subtle. In domestication, we isolate them – move them from paddock to stable to yard – separating them from their companions for our convenience, then find them fragile, anxious and difficult to handle.
An immersive and transporting memoir, Perfectly Themselves offers intimate portraits of horses living freely in the company of their own kind, from Aotearoa to the Outer Hebrides, Iceland and Mongolia. Underpinning Letteri’s research is a question sparked by a 33,000-year-old carved horse that seems alive with vitality and ease: what did we once know about horses that we have forgotten?
Part travel narrative, part intellectual inquiry and part personal reckoning, Perfectly Themselves challenges longheld assumptions about human–horse relationships, inviting readers into a more compassionate way of seeing them – not as objects of human desire, but as beings perfect in themselves.
About Dr. Abby Letteri
Abby Letteri has a PhD in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka (Victoria University of Wellington), New Zealand (2025). Her thesis, Waiting for the Light: Considering the Horse in the Human World, critically examines the complex relationships between horses and humans across cultures and throughout history, focusing on the profound impact human activity has had on the lives of horses and other equids. Her work integrates historical and cultural analysis and personal narrative which she hopes will contribute to scholarly discourse as well as appeal to a broader audience. Abby spent several years travelling to various parts of the globe, from the Outer Hebrides to Mongolia, to observe free-living and wild horses in a variety of settings. She lives in Te Whanganui a Tara (Wellington), Aotearoa New Zealand, and looks after her own horses on a small farm on the Kapiti Coast.
A book based on her doctoral research, Perfectly Themselves: Horses in the Human World, is forthcoming from Te Herenga Waka University Press in September 2026. Abby previously published, down they forgot, a memoir (2021). She has written for a variety of publications including The New Zealand Review of Books, Liberty Hill Poetry Review, Concordia International Equestrian Magazine, Horses and People, and British Horse (the magazine of British Horse Society).
Abby was awarded Victoria University’s prize for Original Composition (2003) and received her Master’s in Creative Writing with Distinction (2004).
If you would like to see Dr. Letteri’s keynote address, please click here to register for the conference.