Janet Charman writes poetry and literary criticism. Known for her distinctive voice and content she has published ten poetry collections, most recently, The Pistils (2022) and The Intimacy Bus (2025), both through Otago University Press. In 2008 Janet received the Best Book of Poetry Award at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards for her collection, Cold Snack, and in 2010 she was co-winner of the IWW Kathleen Grattan Prize (Auckland) for an unpublished sequence of poems for At the White Coast. In 2023, The Pistils was runner up in the 2022 NZSA New Zealand Heritage Literary Awards and longlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry. Janet identifies as a lesbian and her poems draw on issues that relate specifically to women, including topics such as sexuality, agency, and m/Otherhood. She is known for her stylistic choices such as using limited punctuation and capitalisation, including lowercase for the pronoun ‘I’. Otago University Press describes Janet as ‘a complete original, utterly distinctive in voice and content’. Reviewer Elizabeth Morten describes how Janet’s poems ‘storm the pages with the politic and the personal, with cutting wit and the blunter edges of the domestic scape’.

Janet has published poems in several Australian journals and widely in Aotearoa New Zealand journals. Her work appears regularly in numerous anthologies, including Contemporary New Zealand and Best New Zealand Poems. She was a University of Auckland Literary Fellow (1997 Writer in Residence), was the recipient of a month-long visiting fellowship at the International Writers Workshop of Hong Kong Baptist University (2009) and was Guest Reader at the Taipei International Poetry Forum (2014). Throughout her career Janet has supported her work as nurse, telephone operator and teacher, and with formal recognition for her writing through several Creative New Zealand projects grants and a Major Project Grant from the Literary Fund of the Q.E.II Arts Council. In 2026 she will receive an Alumna Award for Distinguished Achievement through the Spotswood College Alumni Trust.

In addition to her poetic work, Janet has an MA in English from the University of Auckland for which she completed a thesis on the novels of Jane Austen. Since 2017 her gender critical feminism has been expressed through the lens of the Matrixial theories of post Freudian feminist theorist and artist Bracha L. Ettinger, specifically Ettinger’s foundational publication, The Matrixial Borderspace (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Janet’s monograph, SMOKING: The Homoerotic Subtext of Man Alone, A Matrixial Reading (Genrebooks, Dunedin, 2018), is free to download, with a hardcopy forthcoming from Steele Roberts.

In her most recent poetry collection, The Intimacy Bus (Otago University Press, 2025) Janet reckons with some of life’s heaviest traffic: bereavement, grief, ageing, loneliness, gender, sexual identity, power and inequality. Shorn of sentiment, direct and uncompromising, The Intimacy Bus arrives as an irrepressible affirmation of love, life and lesbian desire.

Janet’s creative memoir, 28 days (Skinship Press, 2025), brings together her sharp, poetic voice with the evocative, observational sketches of artist Elizabeth Anderson. In 28 pairings of image and text, the book moves through a cycle of emotional, social, and sexual reflections, snapshots of life in New Zealand Aotearoa that are both personal and powerfully resonant.

She is currently working on a new poetry collection with the working title ‘shop girl’.

 

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Otago University Press writer page

Auckland University Press writer page

ANZRB review of The Intimacy Bus (April, 2025)

Audio: Radio NZ review of The Intimacy Bus (March, 2025)

Spinoff feature ‘Backstory: Janet Charman on the losses we can prevent, and those we cannot‘ (May, 2022)

NZ Poetry Shelf review of The Pistils (April, 2022)

ANZRB review of The Pistils (March, 2022)