Academy of New Zealand Literature

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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)

Linda Burgess is the award winning author of novels, non-fiction titles and short stories and has also written for television. Over the last twenty five years to date Linda has reviewed books for The Listener, The Dominion, Evening Post and Dominion Post, the Listener, and on Radio New Zealand with Kim Hill, to name a few, and on a regular basis The Spinoff, Landfall, NZ Books, and Reading Room. She also regularly reviews film and television for newspapers and magazines such as The Dominion Post, as well as monthly on Radio New Zealand’s Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan. In 2006 she was on the judging panel for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards as well as the novice section of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award.

Her novel Between Friends was shortlisted for Best First Book of Fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards (1995). She was runner-up in the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Memorial Short Story Competition (1997) and the Sunday Star Times Short Story Award (2000). She was a finalist in the Voyager Media Awards 2019 with her essay ‘We’d be called WAGs now’. In addition Linda was Writer in Residence at Massey University (1997).

Linda’s writing for televison includes two Duggan episodes (1999) and one episode of The Strip (2000). She has since achieved her MA in Scriptwriting, with Merit, through the IIML, Victoria University (2008)

Her collection Someone’s Wife: a memoir of sorts (Allen & Unwin, 2019) contains very personal essays exploring her childhood, marriage, life as an All Black wife, and a poignant and strikingly honest reflection on the death of her first born, Toby. Landfall describes Someone’s Wife as ‘hilarious and devastating, a sliver of New Zealand culture and history told through a single vibrant life and its entanglements with others’.

Linda has recently co-edited, along with Maggie Rainey-Smith, the celebration anthology Room To Write: 20 Years of Randell Cottage Writers, commissioned by the Randell Cottage Writers Trust. Forty previous writers in residence from France and Aotearoa New Zealand explore the idea of ‘looking back’. All the work is presented in both English and French, with introductory essays by Dame Fiona Kidman and Beverley Randell Price.

Links

Allen & Unwin writer page 

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer file

Landfall review of Someone’s Wife (June, 2020)

Noted review of Someone’s Wife (Nov, 2019)

Radio NZ interview: Linda discusses Someone’s Wife with Lynn Freeman (Sept, 2019)

Spinoff review of Someone’s Wife (Sept, 2019)

Published in 23 languages, David Vann’s internationally-bestselling books have won 14 prizes, including best foreign novel in France and Spain, and appeared on 83 Best Books of the Year lists in a dozen countries.  He has been featured in 94 international literary festivals and had book tours in 32 countries.  He has written for the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Outside, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, The Financial Times, The New Statesman, Elle UK, Esquire UK, Esquire Russia, National Geographic Adventure, Writer’s Digest, McSweeney’s, and other magazines and newspapers.  A former Guggenheim fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Wallace Stegner fellow, and John L’Heureux fellow, he holds degrees from Stanford and Cornell and is currently a Professor at the University of Warwick in England and Honorary Professor at the University of Franche-Comté in France. Profiled:  New York Times, cover of Arts section, Le Monde (France), El Pais (Spain),  The Sunday Times (UK), Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), The Listener (New Zealand), The Observer (UK), La Vanguardia, back page (Spain), San Francisco Chronicle, cover of Arts section, Metro (UK) “The Big Interview,” The Scotsman, Sunday Business Post (Ireland), The Irish Times, The Anchorage Daily News, Publishers Weekly.

Links

David’s website

Newsroom article discussing David in New Zealand and Halibut on the Moon (March, 2020)

Steven Toussaint was born in Chicago in 1986. He immigrated to New Zealand in 2011 and now lives in Auckland. He has studied poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the International Institute of Modern Letters, and philosophical theology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of a poetry collection, The Bellfounder (The Cultural Society, 2015), and a chapbook, Fiddlehead (Compound Press, 2014). His writing has appeared in numerous publications, most recently Poetry, Commonweal, The Spinoff, Sport, and The Winter Anthology. He has been recognised in the past few years by residencies at The University of Waikato and the Michael King Writers’ Centre and with a Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship. His second collection, Lay Studies (Victoria University Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter.Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Links:

Steven’s website

Victoria University Press author page

NZ Poetry Foundation poet page

NZ Poetry Shelf written interview discussing Lay Studies (Sept, 2019)

Steven reads ‘Aevum Measures’ from Lay Studies

Radio interview w/ Karyn Hay on RNZ’s Lately Book Club (16/7/19)

Radio interview w/ Clare Jones on Fresh FM’s ‘Me, My Shelf, and I’ (9/7/19)

Helen Rickerby is a poet, writer, editor and publisher from Wellington. She has had four collections and one chapbook of her poetry published, most recently How to Live (Auckland University Press, 2019) which won the Mary and Peter Biggs poetry prize at the 2020 Ockham Book Awards. In recent years her work has been exploring the boundaries of poetry, and where it intersects with other forms, such as film criticism, biography and essay.

Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page, edited by Siobhan Harvey, Harry Ricketts and James Norcliffe (Godwit, 2014), Best New Zealand Poems 2014, selected by Vincent O’Sullivan, and New Zealand Writing: The NeXt Wave, edited by Mark Pirie (Otago University Press, 1998).

Since 2004 Helen has single-handedly run Seraph Press, boutique but increasingly significant publisher of beautiful literary books, mainly poetry. In 1995 she was part of the group that founded JAAM literary journal, of which she was co-managing editor, with Clare Needham, from 2005 to 2015.

She has co-organised conferences and events, including Truth and Beauty: Poetry and Biography (2014), Poetry and the Essay: Form and Fragmentation (2017) and the Ruapehu Writers Festival (2016). With Anna Jackson and Angelina Sbroma, Rickerby edited Truth and Beauty: Verse Biography in New Zealand, Canada and Australia (Victoria University Press, 2016), and they are currently editing a collection of essays about poetry and the essay.

Helen lives with her partner, Sean Molloy, in a cliff-top tower in Aro Valley. She earns a crust as a web editor.

Links

Helen’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Helen at Seraph Press 

Helen Rickerby’s blog Winged Ink

Auckland University Press writer page

NZ Poetry Shelf: Paula Green writes about How to Live:(2019)

Radio NZ interview with Mark Amery about How to Live (2019)

Interview in the Poetry Society magazine, A Fine Line, after the publication of Cinema (2015)

Mary McCallum is a fiction writer, poet, songwriter, editor and publisher who has published a novel The Blue (Penguin, 2007) and a poetry collection XYZ of Happiness (Mākaro Press, Submarine, 2018). She has worked as a freelance feature writer, book reviewer, broadcast journalist and television presenter. Mary has won and been nominated for key awards and bursaries, and has published fiction and poetry in literary journals. Mary is the inaugural winner of the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize and her children’s novel Dappled Annie and the Tigrish won a Kirkus Star in the US.

Mary was born in Zambia, and has lived in New Zealand since she was four. She has a BA in English Literature and Political Science from the Victoria University of Wellington (including studying under Bill Manhire) and an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from the International Institute in Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington. She has worked as a broadcasting journalist in New Zealand and Europe, and continues to work as a freelance writer and reviewer. She has also worked as a tutor, including teaching creative writing at Massey University. Masry has been a feature writer for New Zealand Listener, Dominion Post, The Press, New Novel Review, and since 2002 she has reviewed books for Radio New Zealand and in 2007 for the Good Morning show on TVNZ.

In 2013 McCallum co-founded Mākaro Press with her son Paul Stewart in Wellington, New Zealand, publishing books in a range of genres with a focus on fiction and poetry. In 2018, McCallum co-founded a second press – The Cuba Press – with Sarah Bolland, and focused Mākaro Press on a limited number of titles a year eventually reducing it to a single literary novel. The Mākaro novel for 2019 was Auē by Becky Manawatu, which went on to win New Zealand’s top fiction prize: the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize, as well as the MitoQ Award for Best First Novel and the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel. Two of Mākaro’s other novels have won the best first book of fiction award and two others have been longlisted. One of the press’s poetry books has also been longlisted for the poetry award.

Mary’s poetry collection XYZ of Happiness was included in the Listener’s list of top ten poetry books 2018, and led to Mary’s inclusion in Paula Green’s anthology of Aotearoa women poets. Her award-winning novel, The Blue, was reprinted twice in 2008 and translated into Hebrew in 2009. The Blue won the New Zealand Society of Authors Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction and Lilian Ida Smith Award, and the Readers’ Choice Award at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Her second novel is still a work in progress, with the early drafts funded by the Louis  Johnson Bursary awarded in 2008.

Links

Mary McCallum’s blog

Penguin Random House writer page

Mākaro Press writer page

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

The Spinoff feature ‘The rise and triumphant rise of Mākaro Press’ (May, 2020)

Jenny Bornholdt is a poet and anthologist who has been publishing collections of poetry for more than thirty years. Her poems have been continuously recognised in publications such as the Best New Zealand Poems online anthology, and she has been selected for numerous awards and fellowships including the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellowship (2002), Arts Foundation Laureate (2003), Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate (2005) and Creative New Zealand Victoria University Writer in Residence (2010). At the end of 2013 Jenny was acknowledged in the New Year’s Honours list as a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, and then in 2020 was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for poetry. She has edited or co-edited poetry anthologies including An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English which won the 1997 Montana Book Award for Poetry and she won the same award in 2009 for her poetry collection, The Rocky Shore (2008). She is considered an influential poet for new and younger writers and her anthologising has helped increase the international reputation of New Zealand poetry and poets.

In her collection Lost and Somewhere Else (Victoria University Press, 2019), Jenny finds many places to stand: at home, in memories of places and people, and in the Ernst Plischke-designed Henderson House in Alexandra, Central Otago, in which she lived while writing these poems. This graceful, witty and unsettling book is Jenny at her very best: her language at once bold and subtle, and even her smallest insights profound.

In A garden is a long time Jenny’s poetry and prose treads deftly around the edges of the life and photographic work of a remarkable artist, Annemarie Hope-Cross (1968–2022). This work is a meditation on time, light and the spaces we all inhabit.

The poems in her most recent collection, What to Wear (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026), observe that life means doing ordinary and marvellous things, like going to Bunnings, falling asleep on the train, losing and finding poems, losing and dreaming of our mothers, loving, dying, and deciding what to wear.

Links 

Victoria University Press writer page 

New Zealand Arts Foundation poet page 

ANZRB review of What to Wear (Feb, 2026)

Radio NZ review of A garden is a long time (July, 2023)

Metro review of Lost and Somewhere Else (Oct, 2019)

Radio NZ review of Lost and Somewhere Else (Sept, 2019)

Briar Wood (Ngapuhi Nui Tonu) is an Aotearoa New Zealand writer, poet and academic who was born in Taumarunui, and grew up in South Auckland. She gained an MA in Literature at the University of Auckland, and at the University of Sussex in the UK she was awarded a PhD in 1990 for her research on women’s writing of the modernist era. Briar lived in London, teaching literature and creative writing for many years.  Returning to Northland in Aotearoa New Zealand, she now combines travel, occasional lecturing and a focus on writing.

Briar’s poetry embraces multiple languages (particularly Te Reo Maori and English), and deploys multifarious, international fauna and flora references. Her poetry has been widely published and anthologised in national and international journals and anthologies. Her collection Welcome Beltane (Palores Press, 2012) which made poetic links between family histories and contemporary places, was awarded the 2013 Holyer An Gof prize for poetry. Her next collection Rāwāhi (Anahera Press, 2017) was short listed for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand poetry prize. Rāwāhi is centred around Northland places where her Te Hikutū ki Hokianga, Ngāpuhi Nui whakapapa resonates with ecological concerns. It has been translated into Ukrainian by Krok publishers.

In her latest collection, A Book of Rongo and Te Rangahau (Anahera Press, 2022), Briar reimagines the lives of Rongo and Te Rangahau, 19th century century wāhine toa, tūpuna of Nga puhi, in radiant verse. The collection also stretches across time into today’s world with poetry about contemporary Te Tai Tokerau, and covers issues ranging from politics and race relations to sharply observed poems about local people and places.

Links

Anahera Press: Briar Wood

Poetry Archive poet page

Youtube: Interview and reading for National Poetry Day (Aug, 2018)

Landfall review of Rāwāhi (April, 2018)

NZ Poetry Shelf – 12 Questions for the Ockham NZ Book Awards Finalists (March, 2018)

‘One World’ in Best New Zealand Poems (2017)

Karyn Hay is an award-winning novelist and broadcaster: her debut novel Emerald Budgies won the New Zealand Society of Authors Hubert Church Best First Book Award in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2001. She was awarded a Frank Sargeson Fellowship in 2004; and is a literary advisor to the Frank Sargeson Trust, and mentor for the New Zealand Society of Authors. The March Of The Foxgloves was published in December 2016 and was a No.1 bestseller on the New Zealand Fiction list. Her latest novel Winged Helmet, White Horse was published in November 2018 to critical acclaim.

Kate Camp described Emerald Budgies as ‘raw, thoughtful and very funny’. Chris Knox said it ‘was not for the queasy… Imagine 1980s Doris Lessing crossed with Bret Easton Ellis and you’re some way to imagining what this book reads like’.  For Denis Welch it was, ‘A relentlessly bleak — if extremely funny — vision of modern life with no redemption whatsoever for anyone anywhere . . . There are times when Emerald Budgies makes Trainspotting look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm’.

The March of the Foxgloves, published in New Zealand in 2016, was historical fiction, set in 1893 in New Zealand, and was No. 1 on the New Zealand fiction charts for several months.

Dionne Christian, writing in the NZ Herald, called The March Of The Foxgloves ‘a funny, lively and energetic romp which delves into the underbelly of society’ and that Hay ‘has paid close attention to the settings – London, Auckland and Tauranga – period details and historical events’. Stephanie Jones found Hay ‘a sly and delightful wordsmith, a grand raconteur of the page, in whose hands historical fiction feels utterly current, even urgent’.

Her third novel, Winged Helmet, White Horse was published in New Zealand in 2018 with the NZ Listener calling Hay ‘a smart, gutsy writer … it’s impossible to read this book without hearing her trademark vocal delivery. She isn’t afraid of flawed characters or loose ends, and throws in plot twists you won’t see coming. Good at witty dialogue, she also takes a few comic and barbed pokes at middle-class life and the literary world’.

Karyn was awarded Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to broadcasting and the music industry in the 2019 New Years Honours List.

Links

Penguin Random House writer page

NZ Society of Authors member page

Radio NZ presenter bio page

NZ OnScreen bio page

Karyn Hay awarded Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (Jan, 2020)

NZ Herald interview on writing, background and Winged Helmet, White Horse (Nov, 2018)

YouTube: ‘The Cafe’ interview on Winged Helmet, White Horse (Nov, 2018)

Sue Wootton grew up in Whanganui and Wellington and lives now in Dunedin. Her writing has been widely published and anthologised in New Zealand and internationally, with some work translated into Hungarian, Romanian, Spanish and Vietnamese. She was the 2008 Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, was awarded the 2012 NZSA Mid-Career Award and 2018 NZSA Beatson Fellowship, and was the 2020 recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton, France. She has won the NZ Poetry Society International Competition, the Takahe International Poetry Competition and the Caselberg International Poetry Prize, and has been runner-up, or listed for, a range of other literary awards including the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Competition, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s Prize, the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and the Landfall essay competition. In 2025 the International Writers’ Workshop awarded Sue the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems for ‘Holding Patterns: seven songs of pots, jars, bowls and vases’.

Her debut novel, Strip (Mākaro Press), was longlisted for the Acorn fiction prize in the 2017 Ockham NZ Book Awards. Writing for Landfall Review Online, Tina Shaw called Strip  ‘a smart, sexy, quietly subversive novel from an author who totally knows what she is doing.’

Sue’s fifth poetry collection, The Yield (Otago University Press, 2017) was a finalist in the 2018 poetry category of the Ockham NZ Book Awards. Of the poems in this collection, Liz Breslin wrote, in Landfall Review Online: ‘They are prisms. Prisms of place, prisms of worship, of wonder, of family, of oddities of language, of dead friends remembered, of – among other things – life, the universe and moonbathing.’

A physiotherapist-turned-writer, Sue is a PhD candidate at the University of Otago, researching the importance of literature to a holistic view of health and wellbeing. She edits a Health Humanities e-magazine called Corpus: Conversations about Medicine and Life, teaches creative writing in schools, universities and community settings. She is working on a novel about a family affected by the 1948 polio epidemic.

Links

Sue Wootton’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Corpus.nz

Otago Daily Times review of Strip (March, 2019)

National Poetry Day interview as Ockham award finalist (Aug, 2018)

Booksellers NZ review of The Yield (March, 2018)

Takahe review of The Yield (Dec, 2017)

Landfall review of The Yield (Oct, 2017)

Otago Daily Times interview and reading from The Yield (Aug, 2017)

NZ Review of Books review of Strip (May, 2017)

Critic review of The Yield (May, 2017)

Takahe review of Strip (April, 2017)

Landfall review of Strip (April, 2017)

NZ Poetry Shelf interview (March, 2017)

Down in Edin interview discussing The Yield, the writing process and Corpus (Jan, 2017)

Radio NZ review of Strip (Nov, 2016)

Otago Daily Times review of Strip (Nov, 2016)

Scoop News feature article on Strip (Oct, 2016)