Academy of New Zealand Literature

Saradha Koirala grew up in Nelson, New Zealand, and is of Nepali/Pakeha descent. She writes reviews, young adult fiction and is the author of four poetry collections: Wit of the Staircase (Steele Roberts, 2009), Tear Water Tea (Steele Roberts, 2013), Photos of the Sky (The Cuba Press, 2018) and The Good Days (Both Sides Books, 2025). Her poetry has been published in NZ Listener, Sport, Turbine, Hue & Cry, Cordite Poetry Review, Broadsheet and New Zealand Poetry Society Anthologies. Paula Green (NZ Poetry Shelf) described Saradha’s poems as ‘economical, graceful’ and ‘mysterious’. Hamesh Wyatt (Otago Daily Times) wrote: ‘This young woman will be going places in our literary scene’.

After she graduated with a Masters in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University (2007), Saradha taught English and creative writing at secondary schools from 2006-2015. In 2012, she received funding from Creative New Zealand to complete her second collection of poetry. She has participated in the Nelson Arts Festival (2014) and Greytown Arts Festival (2012), read at the New Zealand Poetry Society Conference at the National Library of New Zealand (2015), been guest at various poetry evenings and events, and was part of the final panel discussion at the Truth or Beauty: Poetry and Biography Conference at Victoria University (2014). In 2017 Saradha performed poetry at Melbourne University during the Cultural Diversity Week program and was also part of the Cementa 17 Arts Festival in Kandos NSW, reading poetry with Derek Motion and Tanya Thaweeskulchai. She was the convening judge for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Saradha’s young adult novel Lonesome When You Go (Makaro Press) was named a Storylines Notable Book 2017 followed by an award ceremony in Auckland. Her sequel book Learning to Love Blue (Record Press, 2021) won the Young Adult Fiction Award in the 2022 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

Saradha’s most recent poetry collection, The Good Days (Both Sides Books, 2025), is set before, during and after a global pandemic – a time that coincided with becoming a parent. This collection chronicles a journey of creating a home and family and explores the loss and reclamation of identity that occurs as worlds expand, shrink and expand again. The scent of good days and tricky days ahead.

Saradha currently lives in Melbourne.

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Links

Saradha Koirala’s website

Twitter:@Saradha_K

Steele Roberts author page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Wikipedia

NZ Book Awards 2022 awards winners (May, 2022)

Photos of the Sky review by Sarah Lin Wilson at The Reader (Nov 2018)

Article in Nelson Mail (April 2014)

Landfall review of Tear Water Tea (May 2014)

takahē review of Tear Water Tea (2014)

Siobhan Harvey’s review of Tear Water Tea (Aug 2013)

NZ Poetry Shelf review of Tear Water Tea (Aug 2013)

Interview with Tim Jones (Aug 2013)

Carl Shuker is the author of six very different contemporary novels. His first, The Method Actors (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005), is an historical/thriller/love story that explores the darker side of Tokyo at the turn of the century.  The Lazy Boys (Counterpoint, 2006) explores a nihilistic generation within a NZ setting and is described as ‘One of the most important novels published in Aotearoa, just as topical now as ever in its portrayal of sexual violence and destructive, hyper-masculine behaviour within student culture and rugby culture’. Three Novellas for a Novel (Mansfield Road Press, 2011), is an intertwined set of horror stories set in near-future Tokyo, London and Cannes.  Anti Lebanon (Counterpoint, 2013), is a cross-genre political thriller and vampire story set in Beirut and Syria. In 2006 Carl’s The Method Actors was winner of the Prize in Modern Letters, then the world’s richest prize for an emerging author. ‘Brash and fearless,’ wrote the New York Times, ‘The Method Actors is a self-consciously postmodern challenge to our perceived reality and its fictional depiction’. The AV Club described it as a ‘mesmerizing opus…a serious accomplishment’.

A graduate of the University of Canterbury, with a Masters in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington, Carl lived in Tokyo on and off for many years, then London, where he was an editor for the British medical Journal for seven years.  He has participated in festivals in New Zealand and Australia and was Writer-in-Residence at Victoria University in 2013.

Carl’s recent novel A Mistake (NZ: Victoria UP, 2019 | USA: Counterpoint, 2019), is a medical thriller about human fallibility and the dangerous hunger for black and white answers in a world of exponential complications and nuance. Pantograph Punch describes how in A Mistake Carl ‘turns his attention to the theme of human error and how actions can echo and distort in memory and consequence … absorbing and difficult to put down.’ A Mistake is now a major motion picture written and directed by Christine Jeffs, featuring Elizabeth Banks. In conjunction with the film, A Mistake: Film Tie-in (Te Herenga Waka University Press) was released in 2024.

Equal parts workplace comedy, home invasion thriller and literary conundrum, Carl’s latest work, The Royal Free (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024) is an exuberant, dark, wildly entertaining novel about death and copy editing. The Royal Free was longlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

On Carl’s work overall the NZ Listener writes ‘It’s difficult to convey here the thrill of Shuker’s writing, with its up-to-the-minute feel, its endless audacity … with its defiant difficulty, sly ambition and writing more than sharp enough to live up to its own hype’.

Carl currently lives in Wellington with his wife, novelist and poet Anna Smaill, and their daughter.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Victoria University Press author page

ANZRB review of The Royal Free (Nov, 2024)

Pantograph Punch article Books to Look Out For in 2019 (Feb, 2019)

Unity Books interview (2013)

NZ Listener review of Anti Lebanon (2013)

Radio New Zealand interview (2013)

Bianca Zander is a screenwriter, lecturer and the author of two critically acclaimed novels. She is the recipient of the Creative New Zealand Louis Johnson New Writer’s Bursary and the Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship. ‘In every sense,’ wrote Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author, ‘Bianca Zander is a fantastic writer’.

Her first novel, The Girl Below (HarperCollins US, 2012), was published in New Zealand, the UK and the United States, where it was a semi-finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Sarah Laing described this book as combined ‘gritty coming-of-age realism with time-travelling weirdness, Zander’s writing brings the genius of Murakami to mind’. The New Zealand Herald wrote that The Girl Below, ‘works the entwined themes of estrangement and strangeness beautifully’.

Bianca’s second novel The Predictions (HarperCollins US, 2015) received popular acclaim in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the UK. Reviewing this novel, The New Zealand Herald described Bianca as a ‘superb storyteller with a clear eye for character, location and time’.

For two years, Bianca was a staff writer for the NZ Listener magazine. In addition, she has contributed to The Sunday Star Times, Dominion Post, Next and Little Treasures. She has produced radio shows and written for film and television. In 2004, she wrote and co-directed The Freedom Flat, a finalist in the DOCNZ awards, and in 2009, she wrote the dramatic short film The Handover, which screened in competition at the Chicago Film Festival and Encounters, Bristol. In 2007, Bianca co-scripted the cross-platform drama series My Story, which received an innovation award from NZ On Air.

Links

Visit Bianca’s website

Bianca on Twitter

HarperCollins author page

NZ Herald interview (Aug, 2015)

New Zealand born and educated, Barbara Ewing is a writer and actor. To date, she has published nine, mainly historical, novels. She published her first novel Strangers in the UK and America in 1976, but did not resume novel writing until 20 years later. Her third novel, A Dangerous Vine (1999) was long-listed for the prestigious Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction. The Mesmerist (Sphere, 2007), was chosen as Westminster Libraries of Central London Read of the Year. The Circus of Ghosts (Hachette, 2011), was reprinted five times in 2012. Her most recent, The Petticoat Men (Head of Zeus, 2014), was long-listed for the Ngaio Marsh Thriller Award (2015). The Sydney Morning Herald described Barbara’s work as ‘…written with insight, intelligence and style, a highly engaging and entertaining read.’

Barbara has a degree in English and Maori, which she finished while working in the Department of Maori Affairs (now Te Puni Kōkiri). While working as a Vocational Guidance Officer for Maori girls, she was awarded a scholarship by the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council to study acting in London. She left the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art with the Bancroft Gold Medal and had a full and varied career in theatre, television and film, in both the UK and New Zealand. But, as older women’s parts at that time were so few, Barbara eventually returned to writing. What followed was her one-woman play about Alexandra Kollontai, the only woman in Lenin’s first cabinet, which she was invited to perform all over the world. After this, Barbara began to focus on novel writing, with great success.

Barbara’s most recent book One Minute Crying Time (Massey University Press, 2020) is her memoir which explores, with the help of old, fading diaries, the enduring but mysterious interweavings of love, memory and truth.

Links

Barbara Ewing’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Wikipedia

NZ OnScreen bio page

Massey University Press writer page

Massey UP 10 Questions interview discussing One Minute Crying Time (Dec, 2019)

NZ Herald interview (includes video) discussing the re-release of The Actresses (March, 2018)

Chris Price teaches poetry and creative nonfiction MA at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University. She managed the New Zealand Festival’s Writers Week for 12 years, and for much of the 90s she edited the literary journal Landfall. Chris’s first collection of poems, Husk (Auckland University Press, 2002), won the 2002 NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry. Her next book, the genre-busting Brief Lives (Auckland University Press, 2006), was shortlisted for the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Auckland University Press published her third book, The Blind Singer, in 2009.

In 2011, Chris was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship. She has also contributed to two science/art collaborations, Are Angels OK? (Victoria University Press, 2006), and the Transit of Venus Poetry Exchange (Victoria University Press, 2016), which paired German and New Zealand poets and culminated in performances at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair. Her collection Beside Herself (Auckland University Press, 2016) was longlisted for the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Exploring the lobster’s biology and its history in language, literature and gastronomy, The Lobster’s Tale (Massey University Press, 2021) is Chris’s latest work created in partnership with distinguished photographer Bruce Foster. The Lobster’s Tale navigates the perils of a life driven by overreaching ambition and the appetite for knowledge, conquest and commerce. It is the third in the kōrero series of ‘picture books’ edited by Lloyd Jones, written and made for grown-ups and designed to showcase leading New Zealand writers and artists working together in a collaborative and dynamic way.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

IIML staff profile

Auckland University Press author page

ANZL review of The Lobster’s Tale (Oct, 2021)

Stuff.co.nz review of Beside Herself (April, 2016)

Born in Christchurch (1959), David Howard is a poet and co-founding editor of takahē magazine. He describes his writing as ‘gnarled, metaphysical poetry which fosters rather than forbids tenderness.’

David has published several collections, including The Incomplete Poems (Cold Hub Press, 2011), which was 35 years in the making and most recently Rāwaho: The Completed Poems (Cold Hub Press, 2022) consisting of 150 titles. Poems from his volumes have appeared in Best New Zealand Poems. He edited A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie (Otago University Press, 2015), which was named an outstanding book of the year. David has collaborated with the photographer Fiona Pardington, and the composers Brina Jez Brezavscek, Marta Jirackova, and Johanna Selleck.

As well as co-founding the Christchurch literary journal takahē in 1989 (with Sandra Arnold), he also co-founded the Canterbury Poets Collective (1990). A quarter of a century later, both have become literary institutions. Dr Richard Reeve observed that ‘today’s poetry in the South would be very different without David Eggleton, David Howard and Cilla McQueen.’

David’s honours include the NZSA Mid-Career Writers Award (2009), University of South Pacific Poetry Prize (2011), Robert Burns Fellowship at Otago University (2013), Otago Wallace Residency (2014), UNESCO Residency in Prague (2016), and the Ursula Bethell Residency at Canterbury University (2016). His collection The Ones Who Keep Quiet was shortlisted for the Kathleen Grattan Award (2016). He has read at the International Poetry Festival in Granada Nicaragua (2009), and Goronovo Proljece 53, Croatia (2016). In 2019 David was  chosen by the Ulyanovsk UNESCO board to be one of the first two participants of the Ulyanovsk UNESCO City of Literature Residency Programme. He used this time to develop a poetic sequence set in Ulyanovsk, as well as to collaborate with a local composer on a musical setting for his texts. He performed results of his work at a presentation at the end of the stay in Ulyanovsk.

In 2021 from New York, Asia Society, in association with the Iowa International Writing Program, hosted an evening of invited readings ‘Voices From Burma: Poets of No Name’ in support of the Burmese writers killed or arrested following the military coup. David participated in these readings alongside, among others, US Poet Laureates Joy Harjo and Robert Hass and Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek.

David is a professional pyrotechnician who has worked as SFX supervisor for acts such as Janet Jackson and Metallica.

In August 2022 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb hosted an event ‘Translating worlds’ to mark David’s collaboration with the Croat artist Katarina Ivanisin Kardum, whose painting ‘The Eye of the Grasshopper’ is on the cover of his new book Rāwaho: the Completed Poems (Cold Hub Press, 2022).

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Links

David Howard’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre author page (with publications and biography)

ANZL review of Rāwaho: the Completed Poems (Sept, 2022)

Youtube: ‘Voices From Burma: Poets of No Name’ David Howard reading begins at 1:28:40 (June, 2021)

Read David’s poem ‘Fitting’ in Best New Zealand Poems 2020 (March, 2021)

ʌᴎterratypa interview with David discussing New Zealand and Russian literature [in Russian but easily translatable] (Nov, 2019)

UNESCO media release on David in Slovenia and his libretto for the 2019 December chamber opera Water Globe (July, 2019)

Otago Daily Times article on David’s UNESCO Ulyanovsk residency announcement (April, 2019)

New England Review of Books interview with Vlad Savich (May, 2018)

Lynn Jenner is a writer of essays, poetry, non-fiction and hybrid texts. She started writing at the age of forty-nine. Her debut collection Dear Sweet Harry (Auckland UP, 2010) won the Best First Book Award for Poetry in the New Zealand Post Book Awards and the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry. Hugh Roberts (NZ Listener) described Dear Sweet Harry as ‘simply exhilarating’ in the way it ‘weaves together scraps of found material, family history, speculation and archival research…into a kind of fun-house mirror-world evocation of the early 20th century’. Lynn’s four-part hybrid of memoir, essays, prose poems and poetry, Lost and Gone Away (Auckland UP, 2015), was a Metro Best Books (2015) selection and finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (2016). Regarding Lost and Gone Away, C K Stead has described Lynn as a writer ‘whose pithy narratives demonstrate how prose can be ‘poetry’ simply by economy and sly wit’.

After completing the Whitireia Creative Writing Programme (2004), Lynn completed her MA at Victoria University, for which she won the Adam Prize. Lynn completed a PhD in 2013. Her work has since been published in numerous literary and technical journals, nationally and internationally, including Carcanet’s Oxford Poets 2013: An Anthology.  Once an educational psychologist and counsellor, Lynn now teaches creative writing and is employed in research.

In 2025 Lynn won the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award for her manuscript The Gum Trees of Kerikeri, a collection set in Te Tai Tokerau Northland that reflects on place, history and belonging through finely observed details. Her winning manuscript was published in 2026 by Otago University Press.

Links

Lynn Jenner’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Auckland University Press author page

Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award announcement (Oct, 2025)

NZ Poetry Shelf review of Lost and Gone Away (Dec, 2015)

Ian Wedde is the author of nine novels, sixteen collections of poetry, a collection of stories, three books of essays, a memoir, several art catalogues and a monograph on the artist Bill Culbert; his edited work includes two Penguin anthologies of poetry. He is the recipient of well over 30 major awards, including New Zealand Poet Laureate from (2011-2013), and was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in the Queen’s Birthday honours list (2010). He has been awarded 14 grants, fellowships and residences, most recently the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Poetry (2014), and Creative New Zealand Writer-in-Residence in Berlin (2013-14). He has attended around 120 festivals and literary events nationally and internationally, in numerous capacities.

Born in 1946 in New Zealand, Ian spent part of his childhood in East Pakistan, then England. He completed an MA at Auckland University, lived in Amman, Jordan then London, returning to New Zealand in 1972 when awarded the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. He was a poetry critic for London Magazine, art critic for the Evening Post, Wellington, and Head of Art and Visual Culture at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. He was also an adjunct senior lecturer in the Art History and English Departments at the University of Auckland.

Ian says of his poetry, ‘Most of my poems are concerned with how we live, how we should live, and are political in these senses. At the same time I think I seldom tell; I enquire’.

Ian’s latest novel The Reed Warbler (Victoria University Press, 2020) is a beautiful and rich family saga that weaves together the lives of six generations. His latest poetry collection The Little Ache – a German notebook (Victoria University Press, 2021) was written while he was researching The Reed Warbler. In Berlin and the north of Germany around Kiel, nineteenth-century ancestors whisper to him amid the clamour of history and the pleasures of daily life.

Ian’s most recent work is his third essay collection The Social Space of the Essay 2003–2023 (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024) which ranges widely through Aotearoa New Zealand, the Pacific ocean, and the libraries and museums of the world. Artists considered in depth and often from multiple perspectives include Bill Culbert, Ralph Hotere, Tony Fomison, Judy Millar, Peter Black, Anne Noble, Yuk King Tan, Elizabeth Thomson and Gordon Walters, while writers including Allen Curnow and Russell Haley are remembered.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre author page

The Arts Foundation artist page

Victoria University Press author page

Wikipedia

ANZL review of The Reed Warbler (May, 2020)

Radio NZ interview with Ian Wedde discussing The Reed Warbler (May, 2020)

Spinoff review of The Reed Warbler (May, 2020)

NZ Herald review of Trifecta (Oct, 2015)

Radio New Zealand interview regarding The Grass Catcher and ideas of ‘home’ (Sept, 2014)

NZ Herald article and interview (June, 2013)

Radio New Zealand interview regarding The Lifeguard and the Berlin residency (June, 2013)

Chad Taylor is the author of seven novels: Blue Hotel (2022), The Church of John Coltrane (2009), Departure Lounge (2006), Electric (2003), Shirker (2000), Heaven (1994) and Pack of Lies (1993). Heaven was made into a feature film by Miramax and his novels and short stories have been published in the UK, Italy, France, Germany and the USA. Using contemporary characters and themes, Chad’s work explores the outsider and the isolated within a framework of what the Sunday Star Times called a ‘modern, neo-noir style and subjects’. His work was described by The Washington Post as ‘smart, original, surprising and just about as cool as a novel can get’. The Houston Chronicle says he ‘plays with the crime/noir genre for his own philosophical purposes in an open-ended way that subverts reassuring convention’. Time Out London called his work ‘accomplished noir … clear and uncluttered’.

Chad’s first fiction was published in the same year he graduated from Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts in 1988. His short stories have appeared in periodicals such as Landfall, NZ Listener, Sunday Star Times, Sport, Metro as well as a number of anthologies. He was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship in 2001 and the Auckland University Literary Fellowship in 2003. Chad has written four screenplays, most recently REALITi which was selected to screen at Fantastic Fest 2014. He has participated in national and international literary festivals including the Frankfurt Book Fair 2012.

Chad’s new novel Blue Hotel is a gritty, gripping crime novel set in small town New Zealand which has, reviewer Jock Serong states, ‘dialogue so fast and caustic it doesn’t leave prints at the scene.’

Links

For a full bibliography (inc plays) visit Chad’s website

Chad on Twitter

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Wikipedia

Canongate Books author page

Christian Bourgois author page

Europa editions author page

Sunday Star Times review of The Church of John Coltrane (Aug, 2009)

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Links

Auckland University Press author page

Huia Publisher writer page

NZEPC profile page

ANZRB review of Hopurangi—Songcatcher (May, 2024)

ANZL review of Tūnui | Comet (April, 2022)

Maori News interview discussing Tūnui | Comet (April, 2022)

Stuff article: Robert’s Star Waka sells out at Frankfurt Book Fair (Nov, 2012)

Stuff article on Robert’s poem ‘Kawe Reo / Voices Carry’ etched outside Auckland Library (July, 2011)