Academy of New Zealand Literature

An award-winning poet, academic, essayist and editor, Michele Leggott has published eleven collections of poetry, including Milk & Honey (2005, 2006), Journey to Portugal (2007), Mirabile Dictu (2009) and Heartland (2014).

She edited Robin Hyde’s long poem The Book of Nadath (1999) and Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde (2003). A major project since 2001 has been the development of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) at the University of Auckland.

She was the inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2007-09 and received a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2009 New Year Honours for Services to Poetry. In 2013 she was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry.

Her latest collection Face to the Sky speaks to the art and writings of nineteenth-century New Zealand painter Emily Cumming Harris. The collection tells stories of love and loss from two women in the shadow the same mountain, more than a century apart.

In 2025 Michele published, in collaboration with Catherine Field-Dodgson, Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris (Te Papa Press), which is a luscious tribute to an early New Zealand botanical artist. Groundwork was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Auckland University Press writer page and book list

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre poet page

ANZRB review of Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris (June, 2025)

NZ Poet Laureate blog page  (2007 – 2009)

Rachael King is an award winning writer and for eight years was Literary Director of the WORD Christchurch Writers & Readers Festival. Her first book, The Sound of Butterflies (2006), was published in New Zealand, Britain and America, and translated into eight languages. It won the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Best First Novel. ‘The story of traumatised lepidopterist Thomas Edgar,’ Eleanor Catton wrote in the Listener, ‘had such a quiet and unsettling power that I found myself dreaming of the Amazon for weeks.’ The Washington Post called it ‘captivating’, while the Observer said the novel ‘fuses Edwardian gentility with obsession, murder, and a glimpse of the giddy excess of the Brazilian rubber boom…It’s convincing, told in prose as opulent as one of Thomas’s specimens.’

Rachael was the Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at Canterbury University in Christchurch (2008). The result was Magpie Hall (2009), a New Zealand version of a Gothic Victorian mystery, which was longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC award. Iain Sharp called it ‘a wily meditation on the ways that fantasy, desire, guilt, influential reading and hunger for esteem affect the way we perceive and report the past – including our own personal histories…King is not just a one-off talent but here for the long haul.’

Red Rocks, her first novel for children, won the 2013 LIANZA Esther Glen medal for junior fiction, New Zealand’s longest-running literary award, and was shortlisted for the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards.

Over many years, Rachael has participated as chair, panelist and speaker in national festivals, and was a panelist in the Wordstock Festival, Oregon. In 2020 Rachael was named an Honorary Literary Fellow in the New Zealand Society of Authors’ annual Waitangi Day Honours.

Rachael is currently working on a book of essays.

Links

Rachael King’s website

Twitter:@rachaelking70

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Interview on Radio New Zealand with Noelle McCarthy on Creativity (2014)

Avenues feature (2013)

Dominion Post/The Press feature on Red Rocks (2012)

Louise Wareham Leonard is a novelist and writer currently living in New York. Her novels concern family sexuality, sexual abuse, the interior lives of women and relationships between men and women. Set in both New Zealand and New York, they also explore ‘the search for sanity’ (Dame Fiona Kidman) in a world of ‘priapic narcissism’ (Stout scholar John Newton.) Her work, says Newton ‘raises the bar,’ telling us ‘what to ask of a worldly intelligent fiction’.

Her 2015 metafiction 52 Men is highly original in form, with blurbs by acclaimed male writers and cameos by celebrities, including Jonathan Franzen and Michael Stipe. It explores the narrator’s myriad friendships and relationships in the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse. It has been highly acclaimed, and on several occasions, publicly disabused by male journalists.

Louise has been reporter and reviewer for Wellington newspaper Dominion. She studied New Zealand literature at Victoria University in fulfilment of her BA for Columbia College in New York. She later completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML (2003), published a best-selling novel with Victoria UP (2007) and was twice a finalist for the Prize in Modern Letters (2006 and 2008). She was for some years a reviewer for the NZ Listener. Most recently, she has written for New Zealand Books, FlashFrontier.com and been interviewed by both the New Zealand Festival 2016 and Flash Frontier.com. She is a reader for the American literary journal Tin House.

Louise has two works forthcoming: Jane Says, a novel exploring the clash of old world/new world values in 1980s and 90s Manhattan, and a non-fiction book Love Unto Death, a study of love suicides.

In her latest work, an E-book Fiery World (2022), a young girl in grief wanders her local park and meets a shapeshifting God with whom she makes a journey from grief to life.

Links

Louise Wareham Leonard’s website

Twitter:@louisewareham

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Victoria University Press author page

Wikipedia

Landfall review of 52 Men (July, 2016)

Feature article in LARB (April, 2016)

Flash Frontier interview [second story] (Feb, 2016)

ThoughtCatalog.com article by Louise Wareham Leonard (Dec, 2015)

NZ Festival ARTicle magazine interview (Oct, 2015)

Article in The Rumpus ‘How to Date a Writer’ (Sept, 2015)

Carolineleatittville.blogspot interview (Sept, 2015)

Anne Kennedy is a poet, novelist and screenwriter. She has published ten books in the form of poetry collection, novel, novella or verse novel. Her work has been published in NZ Listener, Landfall, JAAM, Sport and Southerly (Australia) and Poetry (US). Reviewer Louise O’Brien wrote that her novel The Last Days of the National Costume (Allen & Unwin, 2013) ‘offers an irresistible combination of charm and wit…The wordplay is glorious and very playful indeed’. Describing The Darling North, a poetry collection, North & South wrote that the ‘whole volume sings with music’.

Anne’s accolades include the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Poetry (2021), the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry (2013), Montana NZ Book Award for Poetry (2004), and the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award (1984). The Last Days of the National Costume was shortlisted for the NZ Post Book Award for Fiction (2014). Screen credits include the adaptation, The Monkey’s Mask and Crush, co-written with director Alison Maclean. Anne was editor of Ika, co-editor of Trout, and has guest-edited Best NZ Poems, JAAM and Landfall. She taught fiction and screenwriting at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa and is now at Manukau Institute of Technology. In addition, Anne also taught on the Auckland Writers Festival Schools Mentoring Programme, and judged the 2016 National Schools Poetry Competition.

Anne has appeared in a variety of festival roles both nationally and internationally and was Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa (2006). She has been awarded the University of Auckland Literary Fellowship (1995), and Michael King Fellow at the University of Auckland (2014). In 2016 she became Writer-in-Residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington and in 2017 attended the Fall Residency at the University of Iowa International Writers Program.

The Ice Shelf (VUP, 2018), Anne’s latest novel, is an eco-comedy that explores the dangers of wasting love and other no-renewable resources.

Anne returns to the death of her brother and the world he inhabited in her poetry collection Moth Hour (AUP, 2019), a complex, ambitious piece of writing and a moving poetic engagement with tragedy. Moth Hour was shortlisted for the 2020 Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry.

In Anne’s poetry collection, The Sea Walks into a Wall  (AUP, 2021), the natural world around us hits back. Intelligent, playful, witty and innovative, these poems bite where it hurts. The Sea Walks into a Wall was shortlisted for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.

In 2023 Anne edited Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland University Press), a selection of over 200 poems from Aotearoa – whakataukī and odes, poems of love and of nature, of whānau, history and politics.

Links

Twitter:@annekennedee

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Auckland University Press author page

Victoria University Press author page

Wikipedia

ANZRB review of Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand  (Oct, 2023)

Ockham New Zealand Book Awards shortlist announced (Mar, 2022)

Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Poetry announcement (Nov, 2021)

Barbara Else is the author of three novels: six for adults and seven for children. Her work is distinctive for its strands of subversive humour. She has also written short stories and plays for adults and children and has edited eight children’s anthologies. In addition, she is a literary agent, editor, fiction consultant and playwright. Barbara has been awarded an MNZM for Services to Literature (2005), and Margaret Mahy Medal for lifetime achievement and services to children’s literature (2016). In 2025 Barbara received the CNZ Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for fiction.

Her best-selling first novel The Warrior Queen was described by Quote Unquote as ‘the accessible feminism.’ Four more contemporary novels followed, then an historical novel Wild Latitudes. Books in her children’s quartet Tales of Fontania have won several awards including the Esther Glen Medal, the prestigious IBBY and White Raven Awards, Honour Awards in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, and Storylines Notable Books Awards. Her non-fiction work for children, Go Girl – a storybook of epic NZ women (Penguin 2018), broke local sales records and was a finalist for the NZ Post Children’s Book Awards 2019. In 2024 Barbara’s memoir Laughing at the Dark (Penguin, 2023), a funny, moving book about how she rebelled against being a ‘good girl’, was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for General Non-Fiction.

Barbara has an MA Hons in English Literature and Literary Criticism. She has twice been a judge of the NZ Post Children’s and Young Adult Book Awards, the second time in 2014 as Chief Judge. She is co-director of a small NZ literary agency and manuscript assessment service, and with husband and author Chris Else, was instrumental in setting up both the New Zealand Association of Literary Agents and the New Zealand Association of Manuscript Assessors. She was the Victoria University of Wellington Writer in Residence (1999), and CNZ/Otago University Children’s Writer in Residence (2016).

Her most recent work The Pets We Have Killed (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2024), marks Barbara’s return to fiction for adults. The stories in this collection are notable for their range in genre and tone, from realism to science fiction and fantasy, from subversive humour and sharp satire to thoughtful and humane contemplation of the human condition. Many are about romantic relationships – fresh and new, would-be, or long gone. With Barbara’s trademark wit, all demonstrate how the problems women face change little as time passes …

Links

Barbara Else’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Random House Books author page

CNZ Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement announcement (Nov, 2025)

ANZRB review of Pets We Have Killed (Dec, 2024)

Otago Daily Times article on Go Girl (2018)

Barbara’s Storylines Margaret Mahy Medal lecture (2016)

Otago Bulletin article on the University Fellows’ Event at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2016)

Otago Bulletin article in which Barbara discusses Dunedin and her writing (2016)

Quote Unquote reprinted review of Warrior Queen by Mark Amery (2013)

Quote Unquote reprinted review of Warrior Queen by Shirley Maddock (2013)

James George is a novelist and short story writer of Ngapuhi, English and Irish descent. He is author of Wooden Horses (Hazard Press, 2000), Hummingbird (Huia Publishers, 2003), and Ocean Roads (Huia, 2006) and Sleepwalkers Songs (Huia, 2016). Zeta Orionis (an excerpt from Hummingbird) won the premiere award in the 2001 Maori Literature Awards, judged by Keri Hulme. His short fiction has appeared in anthologies such as: Second Violins, The Best of NZ Fiction (twice), and Get on the Waka – Best Recent Maori Fiction. Writing in the NZ Herald, Margie Thomson described Hummingbird as ‘demanding and ambitious … [and] above all incredibly moving’. Writing also in the NZ Herald of James George’s short story ‘Walking to Laetoli’ in The Best of NZ Fiction volume 1, reviewer Siobhan Harvey said: George’s stunning Walking to Laetoli lovingly explores the dysfunctions of father and son relationships. Like all of George’s offerings, it’s wonderful reading’.

Amongst his awards and prizes, his second novel Hummingbird was a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards (2004), and the Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize (2005). Ocean Roads (Huia, 2006), appeared on the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Shortlist as one of the Best Books in the South East Asia and South Pacific region and was shortlisted in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007. James was also a recipient of the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow in 2007.

James teaches creative writing at AUT in Auckland, on both the BA and MCW programmes. He is currently working on his fifth novel, Two Rivers.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Huia Books author page

Cliff Fell is a poet, musician, reviewer and broadcaster who was born in London to an English mother and New Zealand father. He is the author of three books of poems: The Adulterer’s Bible (Victoria University Press, 2003), Beauty of the Badlands (Victoria University Press, 2008), and a 156-line acrostic/alphabetary, The Good Husbandwoman’s Alphabet, an illustrated chapbook (Last Leaf Press, 2014). A number of his poems can be found online, notably in various Best New Zealand Poems anthologies and also the Griffith Review website. The New Zealand Poetry Society has described Cliff’s work as ‘ambitious, musical, and interesting’.

His first book The Adulterer’s Bible, received the 2002 Adam Prize in Creative Writing and the 2004 Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry. His poem ‘Ophelia’ was named one of the Best New Zealand Poems (2003), ‘Ovid in the Antipodes’ (2006), ‘The M at the End of the Earth’ (2007), ‘Two L tt  s fo Lo d  uth  fo d’ (2008), ‘Secret Vita’ (2011), ‘Chagall in Vitebsk’ (2013) and ‘L’Anima Verde’ (2014).

Cliff has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University. In 2015 he was a Teaching Fellow at the International Institute of Modern Letter in Wellington, convening the MA workshop in Poetry and Non-fiction. For some years he has also discussed poetry on Radio NZ National Nights. He has been a participant in national festivals, both as speaker, tutor and chair. He currently teaches part time at Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology. He lives near Motueka, in the upper South Island.

Cliff is at the final stages of a new collection of poems.

Links

Twitter:@FellCliff

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Victoria University Press author page

Selina Tusitala Marsh is a poet of Samoan, Tuvaluan, English and French descent and was the New Zealand Poet Laureate (2017-2019). Her poetry is published in over 67 anthologies, academic texts, print and online literary journals, and translated into Ukraine, Spanish and Italian.  Since 2007, she has performed at over 119 national and international events and given over 100 poetry writing workshops. She was a Poet Olympiad for the 2012 London Olympics Poetry Parnassus event, and in 2015 won the London Literary Death Match at the Australia New Zealand Literary Festival. The NZ Listener has described her as the ‘vanguard of contemporary Pacific Literature’, and ‘one of the most important poetic voices of her generation’. Selina was the 2016 Commonwealth Poet, during which she attended Westminster Abbey, where she performed her commissioned poem ‘Unity’, for the Queen. She was the poet MC for the 2018 formal dinner for visiting ex-US president Barack Obama. In 2019 Selina was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Years Honours List, for services to poetry, literature and the Pacific community, and in the same year was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Among her numerous publications, Selina’s award-winning poetry collection, Fast Talking PI (Auckland UP, 2009), featured at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair, won the NZSA Jesse Mackay First Best Book Award (2010) and its titular poem took on cult status in schools and community groups.  Her second poetry collection, Dark Sparring (Auckland UP, 2013) received critical acclaim, including both the Top 5 NZ Best Seller List and NZ Listener’s Best 100 Books in 2013.

As a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Auckland, teaching New Zealand and Pacific Literature and Creative Writing, Selina’s critical and creative work focuses on giving voice to marginalised communities. Selina is also the designer and facilitator of Best Leadership Academy’s Pasifika Mat programme which examines leadership through creativity, and the co-ordinator of Pasifika Poetry Web (nzepc), an audio visual archive of Pacific poets and their work. Poetry by Selina was included in UPU, a curation of Pacific Island writers’ work which was first presented at the Silo Theatre as part of the Auckland Arts Festival in March 2020. UPU was remounted as part of the Kia Mau Festival in Wellington in June 2021. Selina was a judge for the New Zealand Ockham Book Awards 2016.

Selina’s third poetry collection Tightrope (AUP) was launched in August, 2017, the same night Selina was announced as New Zealand’s first ever Pasifika woman Poet Laureate. Tightrope made the long-list for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards as Best Book of Poetry (2018).

Selina’s book Mophead: How Your Difference Makes a Difference (AUP, 2019) is an inspirational graphic memoir of growing up Pasifika in New Zealand. This was followed by Mophead Tu: The Queen’s Poem (AUP, 2020).

A book based on her doctoral thesis, Led By Line: First Wave Oceanic Women Poets (1974-2016) is currently in press with the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

In 2024 Selina was awarded the prestigious Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, becoming the first Pasifika writer to receive this honour and marking a significant moment in recognising Pacific voices in Aotearoa New Zealand’s literary landscape.

For Selina’s lively description of the Queen’s poem, her reading, and subsequent conversations with royalty, follow this link.

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Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

University of Auckland staff profile

Wikipedia Selina Tusitala Marsh

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre poet page

Poetry Foundation poet page

NZ Poet Laureate blog

ON Demand TVNZ’s Sunday program (March, 2018)

Guardian interview and article on performing for the Queen (Feb, 2018)

Viva interview (Dec, 2017)

Radio NZ interview (Dec, 2017)

Stuff article – Selina is 2017 NZ Poet Laureate [includes Fast-Talking PI video] (Aug, 2017) 

Anna Leclercq on Fiona Kidman:

On a leafy summer’s morning in a West Sussex village park, a group of girls sat in one half of a grassy circle and boys in the other.  The boys were pouring over a difficult crossword cut from a national newspaper.  Not much had been filled in. ‘Broad heavy knife used as implement or weapon,’ called out one of the boys. ‘Something, something “C” something, something, something “E”.’  No one answered. Suddenly, the word ‘machete’ spilled from my mouth. ‘What?’ ‘Machete!,’ I said again a little louder. The boy looked down at the crossword puzzle, wrote in the missing letters, then looked up at me with an angry and condescending expression. ‘How on earth did YOU know that?’ he demanded. The presumption of intellectual superiority by right of gender overwhelmed me.

Many years later and many countries later, as a mature student at University in Auckland reading English literature for a Masters degree, I came across a book titled A Breed of Women (published in 1979) by Fiona Kidman. At the time I was looking for a New Zealand writer to contrast and compare with a Latin American writer who was the subject for my thesis. After devouring this and a number of other Kidman books, including two autobiographies (At the End of Darwin Road: A Memoir, published in 2008, and 2009’s Beside the Dark Pool), the Latin American writer had slipped away and Kidman became my focus.

Many people have written about Dame Fiona Kidman and her complex and abundant body of work, and many awards have come her way.  She is a wonderful story teller; she is a social historian from a feminist point of view; she is versatile. She’s written plays, poetry, novels (two of my all-time favourites are The Captive Wife, published in 2005, and The Infinite Air, 2013), and short stories; she’s worked in radio, as a freelance journalist, and so much more. Her body of work is formidable, (she has published more than thirty books), and so is her bravery in exposing details of her own life in order to bring more weight to her arguments when tackling the taboo subjects of her epoch.

When Kidman began her literary career, she was not some trendy arty type on the margins of polite society. She was an ordinary young New Zealand woman living in a time when women were supposed to be sexually inactive, voiceless and placed second to men. Through her writing, Kidman, along with other women writers of her era, spoke for those young women who did not dare to speak for themselves, using language they understood, disproving the myths, exposing the inequality of their lives domestically, sexually, and in the business world. People were shocked by A Breed of Women, but Kidman remained resolute in her belief that she had something important to say.

Accolades

University of Otago Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies (CISS) Irish Writers Fellowship (2021)

NZSA Heritage Book Award for Fiction (2020)

Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize (2019)

New Zealand Heritage Book Award (2016)

New Zealand Post Book Awards for Fiction [finalist] (2012)

Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize [shortlisted] (2012)

Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction (2011)

New Zealand Society of Authors (PEN NZ Centre) President of Honour (2008/2009)

Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres [Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters] (2009)

Légion d’Honneur [French Legion of Honour] (2009)

Creative New Zealand Michael King Fellow (2008)

Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellow (2006)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards for Fiction (runner-up) (2006)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards Readers’ Choice Award (joint winner with Maurice Gee) (2006)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards AW Reed Lifetime Achievement (2001)

Dame Companion New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Literature (1998)

Arts Council Award for Achievement (1988)

New Zealand Book Award for Fiction (1988)

Officer Order of the British Empire for services to Literature (1988)

New Zealand Book Awards for The Book of Secrets (1987)

Mobil New Zealand/ Outlook Short Story Award (1985)

New Zealand Scholarship in Letters (1981)

Ngaio Marsh Award for Television Writing (1972)

Links

Fiona Kidman’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Penguin Books author page

ANZL review of So far for now (June, 2022)

Noted feature article on winning the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize, with comments from judges (2019)

NZBAT media announcement on the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for This Mortal Boy (2019)

NZSA Oral History Podcast Series: Fiona discusses life at the heart of PEN (recorded Dec, 1999, posted Oct, 2018)

NZ Herald article (Aug, 2016)

ANZL ‘The Interview’ with Kelly Ana Morey (Aug, 2016)

NZ Poetry Shelf interview (April, 2016)

Radio New Zealand interview with extract from All Day at the Movies (July, 2016)

NZ Herald review of The Infinite Air  (Nov, 2013)

Stuff.co.nz Dominion Post article (Oct, 2013)

NZ Listener interview (July, 2012)

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

Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Poetry Shortlist (2025)

Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Poetry Longlist (2024)

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

ANZRB review of Table Talk: Opinions, stories and a play (April, 2025)

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)