Academy of New Zealand Literature

 

Anne French (1956) is a poet, editor, former publisher and critic. She won her first literary prize whilst still at secondary school, and was awarded the PEN Young Writers’ Incentive Award for Poetry (1973 and 1974).  Her first poetry collection, All Cretans are Liars (Auckland UP, 1987), won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry and PEN Best First Book of Poetry Award (1988). Six more volumes have followed, most recently The Blue Voyage (Auckland UP, 2015). Her work has been described as ‘candid, sophisticated, literate, and sharp’.

Anne was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Massey University (1993). She has been judge for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Asia Pacific region (1998), and the Montana Book Awards (2004). Most recently, she chaired a session with Jacques Roubaud (French mathematician and experimental poet) at the Auckland Writers’ Festival (2014). Previously, Anne was editor and subsequently publisher, for Oxford University Press, founded the business journal New Zealand Strategic Management, and set up Te Papa Press for the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Anne’s work has been set to music, notably ‘Wild’, a song cycle written for the mezzo soprano Sarah Court (with composer Michael Vinten). A second song cycle based on her translations of Korean poetry premiered in 2016.

Anne sometimes writes as Bill (William Butler) Smith, and those poems are to be found on the reverse side of the labels on jars of Pic’s Peanut Butter.

 

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Wikipedia

 

Eleanor Catton MNZM is the author of three novels and has also worked as a screenwriter, adapting her novel The Luminaries for television, and Jane Austen’s Emma for feature film. Her novels have received international prizes and acclaim including the 2013 Man Booker Prize, and her work has been translated into over twenty-five languages around the world.

Her first book The Rehearsal (2009), was published when she was 22, and won the New Zealand Best First Book of Fiction Award and the Betty Trask Prize, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize. In 2016 The Rehearsal was adapted for feature film, written by Emily Perkins and directed by Alison Maclean.  The Luminaries (2013) won the 2013 Man Booker Prize, making her the youngest-ever recipient of the prize (at age 28) and with the longest book (at 826 pages). Her most recent book Birnam Wood (2023) is a brilliantly constructed tale of intentions, actions and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival. Birnam Wood was shortlisted for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.

In 2014 Eleanor donated her New Zealand Post Book Awards prize money to establish a new kind of grant for New Zealand writers. The Horoeka/Lancewood Reading Grants, named after the New Zealand native tree that transforms in maturity, gives young New Zealand writers the means and opportunity to read. The scheme was later expanded to become the Lancewood Foundation, a philanthropic organisation ‘dedicated to the art and joy of reading’.

Eleanor holds Masters degrees in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and in 2014 was awarded an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington. Eleanor has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, the University of Auckland, and most recently at the Manukau Institute of Technology. She is a seasoned participant in national and international festivals.

Born in 1985 in Canada and raised in New Zealand, she now lives in Britain.

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Te Herenga Waka University Press writer page

Granta Books author page

Wikipedia

Website for the Horoeka/Lancewood Reading Grants

 

Diane Brown is a novelist, memoirist, and poet who runs her own creative writing school, Creative Writing Dunedin. In 2013, Diane was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to writing and education. Her work often straddles the border between poetry and prose, and is mostly committed to the personal and looking for the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Diane’s publications include three collections of poetry: Before The Divorce We Go To Disneyland (1997), winner of the NZSA Best First Book of Poetry at the Montana Book Awards (1997), Learning to Lie Together (2004) and Every Now and then I Have Another Child (Otago UP, 2020). She has two novels: If The Tongue Fits (1999), and 8 Stages of Grace (2002), a verse novel that was a finalist in the Montana Book Awards (2003). She has also published a travel memoir Liars and Lovers (2004), and a prose/poetic work, Here Comes Another Vital Moment. Her latest book, Taking My Mother To The Opera (2015), is an extended poetic family memoir, in part about post World War II domestic life and the ageing of parents. Reviewer Paula Green (NZ Poetry Shelf), described this work as ‘a rollercoasting, thought provoking, detail clinging, self catapulting, beautiful read’.

Diane has held the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship, and was an inaugural fellow at the Michael King Writer’s Studio. She has participated in numerous festivals and events, both nationally and internationally. Among her accolades, she won the Janet Frame Memorial Award (2012), and the Beatson Fellowship (2013).

She lives in Dunedin with her husband, author Philip Temple.

 

Links

Diane Brown’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

NZ Poetry Shelf review of Taking My Mother To The Opera (2015)

 

Amy Brown (1984) is a poet and novelist from Hawkes Bay, who now lives in Australia. She has published three collections of poetry, four children’s novels, and completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne. Her poetry, essays and reviews have been published in Australia and New Zealand.  Amy’s first collection of poetry, The Propaganda Poster Girl (Victoria UP, 2008), was shortlisted for the Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry at the New Zealand Book Awards (2009). Her work has been published in magazines and journals such as Sport, Turbine, Snorkel, the Listener, Landfall and Hue & Cry. She has published two more poetry books: The Odour of Sanctity (VUP, 2013), a contemporary epic poem and Neon Daze (Victoria UP, 2019), a verse journal of the first four months of motherhood. Her other publications include the ‘Pony Tales’ series of novels aimed at eight to twelve-year-old readers, published by HarperCollins. In 2022 she was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript.

Amy has an MA in creative writing, for which she won the Biggs Prize for Poetry, and a First Class Honours degree in English literature. She completed her PhD on contemporary epic poetry at the University of Melbourne in 2012. The creative half of her thesis became her epic poem entitled The Odour of Sanctity, which was published by Victoria University Press to critical acclaim. American critic, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, defined it as a ‘formal tour-de-force, of which the author should be proud’. In Australia, David McCooey wrote, ‘I have no doubts about the importance of this work as contemporary poetry. The ambition of the work is clearly ‘epic’, and its execution is extraordinary’, and Kevin Brophy described it as ‘luminous, deft and surprisingly unholy verse’.

Amy’s current writing and research interests include long poems, unorthodox biographies, historical fiction, and the teaching of creative writing. Her website for the Ian Potter Museum of Art contains creative writing exercises aimed at secondary school students responding to paintings in the museum’s collection. The website can be viewed at www.ekphrasislessons.com.

Amy’s most recent work, My Brilliant Sister (Scribner Australia), is an utterly convincing (and hilarious) portrait of Miles Franklin and a moving, nuanced exploration of the balance women still have to strike between careers and family lives. It gives a fresh take on one of Australia’s most celebrated writers and an insight into life now.

 

Links

Twitter:@acatherinebrown

Simon & Schuster author page

Victoria University Press author page

Ian Potter Museum of Art website

The Lumiére interview with Amy on The Odour of Sanctity (2014)

Wellington poet Diana Bridge has published eight collections:  Landscape with Lines (1996), The Girls on the Wall (1999), Porcelain (2001), Red Leaves (2005), Aloe & Other Poems  (2009), In the Supplementary Garden: New and Selected Poems (2016), Two or more islands (2019) and in May 2023, Deep Colour. She was awarded the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award (2010), and won the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize (2015). Chief judge and Irish poet Vona Groarke, described her work as ‘possibly amongst the best being written anywhere right now – for the arresting composure of the poems, for their reach and depth…for the beauty of their phrasing…for the way they catch you up short and make you wonder’. Her essay ‘An attachment to China’ won the Landfall Essay Competition (2014).

In 2015, Diana was invited to take up a residency at the Artists’ Colony at Yaddo, New York, the first New Zealander to attend since Janet Frame. She was included in the Australian series The Writing Talks run by Deakin University (2003), and was one of eight Commonwealth poets invited to the biennial Conference for the Association of Commonwealth Literatures in Hyderabad, India (2004). She participated in the Auckland Writers Festival in 2013 and 2015.

Diana has lived in London, Singapore, Beijing, Canberra, Hong Kong, New Delhi and Taiwan. She has a PhD in classical Chinese poetry from the Australian National University, and has studied early Indian art history. She is the first foreigner to have taught in the Chinese Department at Hong Kong University.

Diana’s seventh collection Two or more islands (Otago UP) contains poems that navigate vast spaces and examine their subjects intently through diverse lenses. They reflect her immersion in the cultures of China and India, her scholarship in English and classical Chinese poetry, and her exploration of multiple mythologies. The result is an intricate meshing of realities with a remarkable depth and richness of perspective. Literary icon Vincent O’Sullivan describes Two or more islands as ‘a collection quite unlike almost any New Zealand poetry I can think of, one that makes its own totally justifiable demands as it achieves a level of rare impressiveness’.

Diana’s most recent work Deep Colour is a fiercely sensory and meticulously crafted collection. These poems respond with graceful precision to the immediate physical world, and meditate on time, beauty and the nature of being.

 

Links:

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre poet page

Reid’s Reader review of Two or more islands (April, 2020)

Poet Laureate blog with readings (April, 2014)

Review of In the Supplementary Garden: New and Selected Poems in The Hindu (June, 2017)

Dr Maxine Alterio is a novelist, short fiction writer, and an academic mentor. Reviewers have described her as ‘a confident, accomplished writer of considerable verve and range. Her stories can be tragic, wistful, quirky, profound’ (Sheridan Keith, Sunday Star-Times) and as a novelist who ‘skilfully explores the nature of grief and the perversity of human feelings’ (Michael Morrissey, Investigate).

She has published three novels: Ribbons of Grace (Penguin NZ, 2007), shortlisted for the Nielsen BookData New Zealand Booksellers’ Choice Award, Lives We Leave Behind (Penguin NZ, 2012; Editions PRISMA, France, 2013) and most recently The Gulf Between (Penguin Random House NZ, 2019). Her short fiction collection, Live News and Other Stories (Steele Roberts, NZ, 2005), contains work previously published in the NZ Listener. A number of her stories have won, or been placed in, national and international competitions. Others have been broadcast on radio. Several have appeared in anthologies such as Penguin 25 New Fiction (Penguin, NZ, 1998); Best New Zealand Fiction Volume 3 (Random House, NZ, 2006); and Myth of the 21st Century (Reed, NZ, 2006).

Maxine has an MA (University of Otago) and a PhD (Victoria University). In 2010 she won an Ako Aotearoa Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award. She co-authored Learning through Storytelling in Higher Education: Using Reflection & Experience to Improve Learning (RoutledgeFalmer, UK and USA, 2003), recognised internationally as the first book to link the art of storytelling with reflective learning.

Winner of the 2013 Seresin Landfall Residency, Maxine wrote draft chapters of a third novel during her term. The Gulf Between traces the impact of secrets and shame on three generations who come together under the same roof in post-Second World War Naples to care for an ailing matriarch.

In 2019 Maxine was joint recipient of the inaugural Dan Davin Literary Foundation Writer in Residence. During the residency, she worked on several short stories and compiled notes for a fourth novel.

 

Links:

Maxine Alterio’s Website

Twitter:@Arrowbound

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Audio: Radio New Zealand interview on ‘Standing Room Only’ discussing The Gulf Between (April, 2019)

Audio: Radio New Zealand interview with Chris Laidlaw regarding Lives We Leave Behind (2 July, 2014)

Audio: Radio New Zealand review by Carole Beu of Lives We Leave Behind (15 June, 2013)

Landfall review of Lives We Leave Behind (1 June, 2013)

Interview with Maxine Alterio in The Lumière Reader (2008)

 

 

 

Pip Adam’s writing has been described as ‘a kind of post-post modern fiction – nothing meta, no irony, no narrative arc, no insights or character transformations – the stories are flatline and searing and real’ (Helen Lehndorf, Palmerston North Library).  Her diverse work has appeared in Sport, Glottis, Turbine, Landfall, Lumière Reader, Hue & Cry, Metro and Overland. She has been runner up for the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition (2007), received an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award (2012), and her first collection of short stories, Everything We Hoped For, won the NZ Post Best First Book Award (2011). Pip’s novel The New Animals (Victoria UP) won the $52,000 Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and Nothing to See (Victoria University Press, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In 2024 her latest work, Audition, was also shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize.

In 2007, Pip gained an MA in Creative Writing with Distinction from Victoria University, followed by a PhD in 2012 which explores how engineers describe the built environment. She was appointed the Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) and Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence for 2021.

Pip is a book reviewer on RNZ’s Jesse Mulligan show and she also produces Better off Read a podcast outside of the mainstream where she talks with diverse writers and other artists about reading. Several of Pip’s pieces, responding to visual art, have been published in conjunction with exhibitions. In addition, her words were used by photographer Ann Shelton in her installation House Work. She currently facilitates writing workshops in several universities and Arohata Women’s Prison where she works with the Right Here, Right Now collective.

Part science fiction, part social realism, Pip’s latest work Audition (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023) is a genre-bending novel that asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – and about how we live with each other’s violences – and imagines a new kind of justice.

In 2025 Pip was awarded the biennial Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer’s Fellowship. Her project for the Fellowship is to write three works for performance, starting with an adaptation of her latest novel, Audition. This is new territory for Pip, whose works to date have been produced as books for readers.

 

Links

Twitter:@PipAdam

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Victoria University Press author page

Arts Foundation Website

Better off Read podcast

CNZ Micheal King Writer’s Fellowship announcement (June, 2025)

Reading Room article on Pip’s writing, works and themes (July, 2023)

ANZL feature on writing Audition and questioning reality (July, 2023)

Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books: Audition reviewed by Angelique Kasmara (July, 2023)

The Big Idea interview on being a writer, writers’ block and how to fix it (July, 2020)

Stuff article discussing how Pip writes (Oct, 2020)

Stuff article discussing Pip’s 2018 Ockham win (May, 2018)

Ockhams NZ Book Awards Announcement (May, 2018)

Somewhere we can live by Simon Gennard in Pantograph Punch (2016)

Utopias Old and New by Dougal McNeill in Counterfutures Issue 1 (2016)

Siobhan Harvey’s poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in journals and anthologies in New Zealand, Australia, America, United Kingdom and Europe. She is the author of eight books, and editor of numerous collections. The Poetry Archive (UK) holds a Poet’s Page devoted to her work, describing her poetry as ‘that of a quester – a voyager — meditating on separation and discovery, on time lost and time regained, on the tug of distant familial connections, and the new global connectivity which means never being out-of-touch’.

Siobhan has received multiple accolades for poetry and fiction. She is twice winner of New Zealand’s premier prize, the Landfall Kathleen Grattan Award, both for poetry (2013) and for a sequence of poems (2019). In addition she has won the Landfall Essay Prize (2011), the Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition (2012), was runner-up in the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competitions (2014 & 2015), was shortlisted for the 2016 D’Arcy Writers Residencies, and won the AUT Champion of Women Award (2018). In 2020 Siobhan won the published poet division of the UNESCO City of Literature Robert Burns Poetry Prize and was the recipient of the NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship. She was shortlisted twice for the Janet Frame Memorial Award for Poetry (2015 & 2016) and recently The Janet Frame Literary Trust named Siobhan as the 2021 recipient. In 2023 Siobhan won the 2023 Landfall Essay Prize for her essay ‘A Jigsaw of Broken Things’.

On the international stage Siobhan’s story ‘Black Origami Birds’, published in the Griffith Review (Aus) and Asian Literary Review (Hong Kong), won the Write Well Award for Fiction (US, 2016). Siobhan won the Australian Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize (2012), the Notable Essay Memoir Magazine Competition (US, 2018), was long-listed for the Australian Book Review Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2019), and was nominated for the US Pushcart Prize.

Siobhan holds a PhD in Creative Writing and is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Creative Writing, Auckland University of Technology, however she has taught creative writing across New Zealand and the UK. She has appeared in multiple literary festivals including Manchester (UK), Ubud (Indonesia), and Queensland (Australia), as well as diverse New Zealand festivals. These include Guest Poet at the Kapititi Poetry Readings and Guest Author in the National Writers Forum (New Zealand Society of Authors), Ruapehu Writers Festival and Going West Literary Festival (2016), National Writers Forum (New Zealand Society of Authors) and Going West Literary Festival (2018), as well as the Going West Literary Weekend, and the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival (2019). She was also Guest Poet at the 2019 Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Week in Rotorua. Siobhan was president of the New Zealand Society of Authors (2017-2019).

Siobhan’s work has appeared in journals and periodicals such as Griffith Review (Australia), Memoirs of the Feminine Divine: Voices of Power and Invisibility (US, anthology), Landfall and the Atlas Collective. She is a regular writer for Landfall, New Zealand Herald, New Zealand Review of Books, Stuff (online) and Sunday Star Times. Her work was also published in the New Zealand anthology Leaving the Red Zone: Poems about the Christchurch Earthquake.

Siobhan’s latest collection Ghosts (Otago University Press, 2021) is about migration, outcasts, the search for home, and the ghosts we live with, including the ones who occupy our memories, ancestries and stories. Ghosts was longlisted for the Mary & Peter Biggs Award for Poetry.

Links

Otago University Press writer page

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Auckland University of Technology staff page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Poetry Archive poet page

Landfall Essay Prize announcement (2023)

NZSA announcement of the 2021 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry (2021)

Landfall Essay announcement (October, 2020)

Kathleen Grattan Prize announcement (June, 2020)

Landfall review of Cloudboy (Oct, 2014)

The NZ Listener interview with Siobhan for ‘Chapter and Verse’ (July, 2014)

takahē 83 review of Essential New Zealand Poems (2014)

Radio New Zealand review of Essential New Zealand Poems (June, 2014)

takahē 83 review of Cloudboy (2014)

Radio New Zealand interview with Siobhan following her Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry (Oct, 2013)

New Zealand Herald review of Lost Relatives (July, 2011)

Radio New Zealand interview discussing Lost Relatives (June, 2011)

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Appreciation

Paul Little on Fiona Farrell:

For over a decade, I’ve reviewed 70 to 90 local publications each year in North & South magazine. It’s not an unalloyed pleasure. I don’t open every package bearing a publisher’s return address in a state of high excitement. But if that package contains a new book by Fiona Farrell, my feeling of anticipation has never been disappointed.

Reviews go into a void, seldom eliciting any response. Reviewers don’t often get reviewed. But once, to my delight, I got a message from Fiona Farrell, with whom I had no previous acquaintance. She was thanking me for ‘getting’ The Villa at the Edge of the Empire: One hundred ways to read a city. How nice of her, was my first response. How could I not have? was the second. The book is a triumph of clarity and ambition fulfilled. Like all her work.

Farrell’s 1992 debut, The Skinny Louie Book, arrived without a hint of authorial trepidation and brim-full of confidence. The title gave no hint as to what sort of book it would be. If anything, it suggested another story told by a child in rural New Zealand, their narration suffused with naïve dramatic irony.

Instead, we got an insanely ambitious book, built around great polarities: hopes and disappointments, birth and death, comedy and tragedy, war and peace. It was a pageant set against a social history of the twentieth centre and beyond. A boisterous novel, bursting at the seams with invention. It could have been called the book of everything.

A reader might have wondered what there was left to write about.  In retrospect, it was like a literary clearing of the decks so she could work without tradition looking over her shoulder.

How dare she? I don’t know, but I’m so glad she did. Daring has been a hallmark ever since. There’s courage in the refusal to repeat herself, to turn out consistent product in a way that would make for an easier sell. She has amassed a following drawn by her exuberant originality.

Farrell has never written the same book twice.  Except for the one she wrote three times. Her books inspired by the Canterbury earthquakes and their aftermath is as clear a case as you could find of a subject finding the writer it needed. The Broken Book (2011) was a collection of short prose pieces and poems in immediate response to the event. It was followed by The Villa at the Edge of the Empire (2015). I wrote on publication that it had ‘something wonderful in every chapter; and as often, something terrible’. It was so many things: a polemic, a history, a eulogy, a satire, a consolation, a howl of rage, a tribute. What more could one ask for?

Why, a companion novel of course, conceived in tandem with the work of non-fiction. Two years later, through the lens of the eponymous villa and the people who lived in it, Decline & Fall on Savage Street—in 100 chapters, like its predecessor—analysed the events in excruciating and forensic detail.

Across the years of Fiona Farrell’s work, I’ve found an almost perfect fit between what I hope to find in any writing—surprise, excitement, daring, perspective, splendour—and what she produces reliably time after time.

Not only that, she is kind to reviewers.

 

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Biography

Fiona Farrell publishes fiction, poetry, plays and non-fiction. She has received numerous accolades, including the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (1995), the Rathcoola Residency in Donoughmore, Ireland (2007), and the University of Otago Burns Fellowship (2011). In 2007, Fiona received the prestigious New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, and in 2012, she was awarded the Order of New Zealand Merit for Services to Literature.

Fiona’s first novel, The Skinny Louie Book (Penguin, 1992) won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction (1993). Later novels The Hopeful Traveller (Random House, 2002), Book Book (Random House, 2004) and Limestone  (Random House, 2009) were shortlisted for the award in 2003, 2005 and 2010, and also longlisted for the International Dublin IMPAC Award.

Her novel, Mr Allbone’s Ferrets (Random, 2007) has been published in America (St Martins Press, 2009), translated into French (Fayard, 2014) and was nominated for the 2009 IMPAC Award.

Her short fiction awards include the Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award and the American Express Award. Fiona’s short stories have also been widely anthologised, appearing in the company of Alice Munro, William Boyd and Hanif Kureishi in Heinemann UK’s annual Best Short Stories (1990 and 1994).

Fiona has published five collections of poetry, and her work has appeared in several major anthologies including The Oxford Book of New Zealand Poetry and Bloodaxe’s best-selling Being Alive. In 2020, Otago University Press published Nouns, verbs, etc., a selected edition of her poems published and previously unpublished. ‘They know how to rescue the heart and let it sing,’ commented Bill Manhire.

Her plays, which have been produced nationally and abroad, include Chook Chook, one of Playmarket New Zealand’s most frequently requested scripts.

Following the earthquakes that struck her home town, Christchurch, in 2010/2011 Fiona turned to non-fiction, publishing essays and interviews. In 2013 she was awarded Creative New Zealand’s premier bursary, the $100, 000 Michael King Fellowship, to write twinned books of fiction and non-fiction about the rebuilding of the city. The Villa at the Edge of the Empire: One Hundred Ways to Read a City (Penguin Random House, 2015) was short listed for the 2016 New Zealand Book Award in Non-Fiction, while Decline and Fall on Savage Street (Penguin Random House 2017) received that year’s Heritage New Zealand Novel Award.

In April 2023, her eighth novel, The Deck, was published by Penguin Random House NZ.  Borrowing motifs from Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth century masterpiece, The Decameron, it questions the role of fiction in a time of plague and global calamity.

 

Accolades

Finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for Non-fiction (2016)

Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer’s Fellowship (2013)

Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature (2012)

Robert Burns Fellow (2011)

Finalist in the 2010 New Zealand Book Awards for Fiction (2010)

Dublin IMPAC Award nomination (2009)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards for Poetry shortlist (2008)

Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement (2007)

Rathcoola Residency in Donoughmore, Ireland (2006)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards shortlist (2003 and 2005)

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards nomination (2003 and 2005)

Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship (1995)

New Zealand Book Award for Fiction (1993)

Canterbury University Writer in Residence (1991–1992)

Mobil Award for Best Radio Drama (1990)

Inaugural Bruce Mason Playwriting Award (1983)

 

Links

Fiona Farrell’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Otago University Press author page

Random House Books author page

ANZRB review of The Deck (April, 2023)

Podcast: 2020 Christchurch WORD ‘Letter to Katherine Mansfield‘ [Fiona 3rd speaker] (Nov, 2020)

NZ Poetry Shelf review of Nouns, verbs, etc. (Jan, 2021)

Fiona’s University of Auckland lecture ‘Fiction and Factions: the Political Novel in New Zealand’, Auckland Writers Festival (2018)

Stuff review of Decline and Fall on Savage Street (2017)

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Central Otago writer and editor Michael Harlow has published twelve poetry collections. Fiona Kidman describes him as ‘a distinguished and serious writer, dealing with big issues: life, death, sorrow, the inner consciousness, yet there is a bubble of gaiety, a vitality, never far from the surface’. Among his many achievements, in 2014 Michael received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry, his poetry collection, Nothing For It But To Sing (OUP, 2016) won the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Prize (2015) and in 2018 he was presented the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in poetry.

His multiple residencies and fellowships include: the Randell Cottage Writer-in-Residence (2004), Burns Fellow, University of Otago (2009), Inaugural Caselberg Artist-in-Residence (2009), and the Wallace Artist/Writer in Residence (2011-2012). He has won the PEN/NZ Best First Book of Prose (1986), been finalist in the National Book Award for Poetry (1991), and finalist in the NZ Post National Book Award for Poetry (2010). In 2016 Michael received the PSNZ/Beatson Fellowship Award. His poem ‘The Holiness of Attention’ was joint winner for Poetry in the 2021 NZSA Heritage Literary Awards.

Associate and Poetry Editor at Landfall for ten years, Michael was also editor for the Caxton Press Poetry series, publishing the early work of some of New Zealand’s leading poets, and contributed as mentor to the work of many well-known others.  He has been panellist and judge for NZ and International Poetry competitions, and represented NZSA on the Burns Fellowship selection committee (three terms). He was co-founder and editor of Frontiers/a Magazine of the Arts, past president/chair of the Christchurch PEN branch, was a New Zealand/Oceania Representative – as a poet, translator, and speaker – at international festivals, and also for the European Association for Commonwealth Literature in Laufen, Germany and Istanbul, Turkey. His work has been translated into Greek, French, Spanish and German.

Michael’s latest collection of prose poems Renoir’s Bicycle (Cold Hub Press, 2022) combines his profession as a Jungian therapist, his sideline as a librettist and musician, his Greek background, and his consummate mastery of this particular art form, and confirms his reputation as a playful and profound poet/storyteller.

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Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre poet page and bibliography

Cold Hub Press writer page

Auckland University Press writer page

Otago University Press writer page

Creative New Zealand Prime Minster’s Award for Literary Achievement media release (2018)

Booksellers NZ article on winning the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award (Oct, 2015)

Radio New Zealand interview after winning the Lauris Edmond Award (March, 2014)