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Lynley Edmeades is the author of Hiding Places (Otago UP, 2025), the collaborative work Bordering on Miraculous (Massey UP, 2022) with painter Saskia Leek, and two collections of poetry, As the Verb Tenses (2016) and Listening In (2019), both published with Otago University Press. Both these collections were longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for Poetry, and her first collection was also shortlisted for the UNESCO Bridges of Struga Best First Book of Poetry. In 2018 she was the Artist in Residence at Massey University and the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury. Her essays have been highly commended in the Landfall Essay Competition (New Zealand) and shortlisted for the Calibre Essay Prize (Australia). She has an MA in Creative Writing from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, and PhD in English from the University of Otago. Her poetry, essays and reviews have been published and anthologised widely in New Zealand and internationally, including Best New Zealand Poems (2016 and 2018) and her poems have been translated in various languages. Jenny Bornholdt describes her poems as ‘terrifically accomplished – they show confidence and a sure, skilful handling of language, even when expressing tentative, slippery ideas and emotions… Edmeades’ voice is an essential one in the ‘now’ of NZ poetry.’ Lynley is the current editor of Landfall.

Her latest work, Hiding Places, is a compelling and beautifully written meditation on early motherhood and creativity. Partly a slowly unfurling unsent love letter to an admired writer, partly a ‘book of essays that is a notebook about trying to write a book of essays’, and partly an attempt to simply hang on through tumultuous times, Hiding Places deftly blends personal reflection with family history, social critique and literary analysis.

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Links

Otago University Press writer page

ANZL review of Bordering on Miraculous (May, 2022)

Landfall Online review of Listening In (April 2020)

Radio NZ: Lynley discusses, and reads from, her collection Listening In (Oct, 2019)

Cordite review of As the Verb Tenses (April, 2017)