Wellington born Kerrin P Sharpe is a poet, writer and teacher of creative writing who now lives in Christchurch. To date she has five collections of poetry all through Te Herenga Waka (formally Victoria) University Press: Three Days in a Wishing Well (2012), There’s a Medical Name for This (2014), Rabbit Rabbit (July 2016), Louder (2018) and Hoof (2023). Reviewers  notably describe her work as, ‘poetry at its finest’ (London Grip), and a place ‘where nothing goes unnoticed’ (takahē). Bill Manhire writes that ‘Kerrin P. Sharpe’s poems make me think of migratory birds. It’s as if they have just settled very briefly on the page after long journeys from far-off places’. Lynley Edmeades (Landfall) describes Kerrin as ‘one of the most original and idiosyncratic voices currently writing in New Zealand.’

Although Kerrin completed Bill Manhire’s Victoria University Original Composition programme in 1976, family life was her focus until later in life. Since resuming writing, Kerrin has been published in many literary journals including: Best New Zealand Poems, The Best of Best New Zealand Poems (2011), Sport, NZ Listener, Trout and Turbine. In Australia, Cordite, Snorkel and Contrappasso; in Britain, London Grip and Blackbox Manifold and in the US, Penduline.

In 2008, Kerrin was awarded the NZ Post Creative Writing Teacher’s Award from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and in 2013 received a Creative NZ grant to write her third collection of poetry, Rabbit Rabbit. Also in 2013, she had twelve of her poems included in Oxford Poets 2013, published by Carcanet Press UK. In 2021 Kerrin was awarded a Micheal King Writers Centre residency.

Kerrin’s latest work Hoof arrives with new urgency and longing. These are poems about a father who can only remember one word, ponies that grow hooves of basalt as they pull Scott and Shackleton around Ōtamahua in sledges, and a woman named Johanna living in a small village in Greenland. She writes about the strange places that watch over our parents, and the delicate but brutal mechanics of surgery. Famous people appear here too: Leonard Cohen, Ted Hughes, William Blake, and Benedict Cumberbatch at a bus stop.

 

Links

Victoria University Press author page

 NZ Electronic Poetry Centre poems in SPORT

Interview with Victoria UP disussing Louder (Aug, 2018)

NZ Poetry Shelf review of Rabbit Rabbit (June, 2016)

NZ Poetry Shelf interview (Sept, 2015)