Iain Sharp on C. K. Stead:

I was part of the judging panel that chose C.K. Stead for the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction in 2009. The rules of the PM’s Awards for Literary Achievement insist on just one prize per writer –  ever. Once you’ve nabbed the fiction prize you can’t return in a year or so to seize the poetry trophy too. During the prize-giving ceremony at Premier House, various acquaintances sidled up to tell me I had given Karl the wrong award.

This was awkward. Part of me wanted to stick to my guns, for Stead’s fiction is a large and fascinatingly diverse body of work, under-celebrated at home, though admired abroad. Subjects tackled include an imaginary totalitarian government, several real totalitarian governments, engineless flight, the birth of Modernism, the birth of modern New Zealand, Sufi sects, the Last Supper, musket warfare in the Waikato and the invasion of Iraq. Voices successfully mimicked include Barry Humphries, Janet Frame, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Katherine Mansfield, Jesus Christ and Tony Blair.

But another part of me wanted to retract and present Karl with the poetry prize instead. In 2009, his Complete Poems, more than 500 pages long, was still new in the shops, reminding me of his wit, felicitous phrasing and mastery of different forms. Moreover, I’d just read his memoir, South-west of Eden, which eloquently reveals how central poetry has been to his life since he was first stirred, at age 14, by – of all things! – a volume of Rupert Brooke, acquired from his sister’s English penfriend.

Of course, yet another part of me wanted to renege in the opposite direction and hand Stead the non-fiction prize. You don’t have to agree with everything he’s ever said to recognise that he’s the most potent and incisive critic that this country has so far spawned. He’s also the only New Zealand author who can boast of a non-fiction book that has been an international hit for more half a century. The New Poetic remains an illuminating read not just as a history of century-old changes in literary technique but as an explanation of how we arrived at the kinds of verse being written in the 21st century.

It’s worth pointing out, as proof of Stead’s courage and by way of putting his later literary spats into perspective, that when, in 1964, young Karl suggested Eliot’s self-definition as a ‘classicist’ was ‘remote from the realities of his poetry, which was full of mysteriousness, obliquity, surprise and accident’, Eliot was dauntingly alive, powerful and able to strike back. Ah, the man who believes himself to be wholly rational but whose plans are continually overturned by circumstances (and emotional responses) beyond his control! Isn’t that also the theme of Stead’s most recent novel, Risk – and, indeed, of all his novels. The question posed in his first poetry book – Whether the Will is Free – seems relevant to this discussion too. Then, pretty soon, all of Stead’s poems come flooding in.

The time is overdue for us to stop splitting Karl up into categories. The connections in his work are more important than the sub-divisions. It’s time to stop peering at the toenails, take a few steps back and try to view the giant as a whole.

 

Accolades

New Zealand Poet Laureate (2015–2017)

Sarah Broom Poetry Prize (2014)

Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction (2011)

The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award (2010)

The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine (2010)

Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement (2009)

Montana New Zealand Book Award (2009)

Member of the Order of New Zealand (2007 & 2009)

CNZ Michael King Fellowship (2005)

Honorary DLitt from the University of Bristol (2001)

Fellow Royal Society of Literature (1996)

New Zealand Book Award for Fiction (1995)

Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1995)

Queen’s Medal (1990)

New Zealand Book Award for Fiction (1986)

CBE for services to New Zealand literature (1984)

D Litt: University of Auckland (1981)

New Zealand Book Award for Poetry (1976)

Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award (1972)

Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (1972)

New Zealand Arts Council Scholarship (1987 & 1992)

Jessie Mackay Poetry Award (1973)

Nuffield Traveling Fellowship (1965)

Readers’ Award (Landfall) (1959)

US Poetry Awards Incorporated Prize (1955)

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Wikipedia

Auckland University Press author page

Penguin Books author page

Otago University Press author page

Carcanet Press author page

RNZ interview discussing You Have a Lot to Lose (June, 2020)

RNZ review by Harry Ricketts of You Have a Lot to Lose (June, 2020)

NZSA Oral History Podcast Series: C K Stead discusses his NZSA history with Michael King (recorded Dec, 2000, posted Dec, 2018)

NZ Herald interview (Sept, 2015)

Radio NZ broadcast following 2015 Poet Laureate Award (Aug, 2015)

BookNotes Unbound article following 2014 Sarah Broome Prize (May, 2014)

Cultural Icons interview (Episode 47)