Academy of New Zealand Literature

Therese Lloyd was born in Napier and grew up in Christchurch, but for most of her adult life has called Wellington home. As of 2019, she is the author of two full-length collections of poetry and one chapbook.

Her first book Other Animals (VUP, 2013) consists of poems written during the course of her MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University and her subsequent year as Schaeffer Fellow at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the US. Other Animals received much critical acclaim and was described as ‘a layered and nuanced collection that repays reading and re-reading’ (Landfall Review Online) and as ‘keenly observed and finely wrought verse’ (NZ books May, 2014).

Therese has worked in a variety of roles for different organisations in Wellington including the Adam Art Gallery, Te Papa Tongarewa and Te Auaha Institute of Creativity.

In 2016 she completed a PhD, also at Victoria University, and 2018 saw the publication of her second full length collection of poems The Facts. Described as ‘a searing meditation on art and loss’ The Facts has recently been shortlisted for the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

In 2018 Therese was the University of Waikato Writer in Residence where she carved out a new collection of poems, and greatly enjoyed giving occasional lectures on poetry about art.

She is currently assembling a collection of New Zealand ekphrastic poetry from 1980 to the present day with the aid of funding from Creative New Zealand.

To read full reviews of her books and other examples of her work, please visit www.thereselloyd.com

Links

Victoria University Press Therese Lloyd

NZ Poetry Foundation poet page

Takahe review of The Facts (Dec, 2018)

Radio NZ interview in which Therese discusses her books (June, 2018)

NZ Poetry Shelf review of The Facts (March, 2018)

Helen Heath lives on the Kapiti Coast, Wellington. Her poems, essays, articles and reviews have appeared in a range of Australasian journals, magazines and anthologies. Her debut collection of poetry, Graft (VUP 2012), was published to critical acclaim. Graft won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book for Poetry award in 2013 and was the first book of fiction or poetry to be shortlisted for the Royal Society of NZ Science Book Prize, also in 2013. The poems in Graft attempt to bring things together – ideas and cultures, people. Sometimes there are unlikely pairs: science and magical thinking, fact and fiction, myth and history. They dig away at things, trying to find a truth or an answer or a lost person.

Helen holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Victoria University. Her thesis explores how contemporary poetry can actively participate in the interpretation of scientific or philosophical ideas – allowing public engagement with cultural dialogues. Her most recent collection of poems, about the intersect between people and technology, Are Friends Electric? (VUP, 2018) won the Mary & Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2019 Ockham Book Awards. The poems in Are Friends Electric? investigate how we incorporate technology into our lives and bodies. In a series of speculative poems on grief, Heath asks how technology can keep us close with those we have lost. How might our experiences of grieving and remembering be altered?

In 2022 Helen was announced as a recipient of a 2023 residency at the Michael King Writers Centre, Auckland.

Links

Helen’s website

Helen on Twitter

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Victoria University Press Helen Heath

Landfall review of Are Friends Electric? (Sept, 2018)

NZ Listener review of Are Friends Electric? (Aug, 2018)

Audio: interview on Better Off Read discussing Are Friends Electric?  (July, 2018)

Audio: Off the Tracks interview discussing writing, kids, numerous topics and Are Friends Electric? (July, 2018)

Audio: Helen reads two poems from Are Friends Electric? on NZ Poetry Shelf (June, 2018)

Cordite review of Are Friends Electric? (June, 2018)

Booksellers NZ review of Are Friends Electric? (June, 2018)

Radio NZ interview: Helen discusses Are Friends Electric? with Mark Amery on ‘Standing Room Only’ (June, 2018)

Radio NZ review of Are Friends Electric? by Harry Ricketts on ‘Nine to Noon’ (May, 2018)

Reid’s Reader review of Are Friends Electric? (May, 2018)

NZ Listener review of Graft (July, 2013)

Landfall review of Graft (Feb, 2013)

Tony Beyer was born (1/7/1948) in Auckland, and educated there. Following a career as a secondary school teacher throughout the North Island he has lived mainly in Taranaki since 2005. Tony has published eighteen collections of poems since 1971, books that record very diverse poetry activity in NZ over time and indicate the context of his writing. His principal published work is concentrated in Dream Boat: selected poems (HeadworX, Wellington 2007), Great South Road and South Side, two longer poems (Puriri Press, Auckland 2013) and Anchor Stone (Cold Hub Press, Lyttelton 2017), which was a finalist in the poetry category of the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Tony has received the United States Tanka Splendor Award twice as well as Australia’s Jack Stamm Award. His poems have been anthologised widely in New Zealand and elsewhere, and appear frequently online in Otoliths.

Poet and critic David Howard describes Tony as a poet who ‘has never followed signposts’ and who ‘has always attended to the road, rewarding us with a considered prosody that honours the moment yet goes beyond it.’ He describes Anchor Stone as ‘disciplined, almost ascetic, but there is a generosity in even the most clipped line, a kind of ‘elated patience’ that is rare, and all the more welcome for its rarity, in New Zealand poetry’.

Tony wrote his most recent chapbook collection Friday Prayers (Cold Hub Press, 2019) in response to the 2019 Christchurch Massacre.

Links

Poetry Shelf review of Friday Prayers (Dec, 2019)

Radio NZ review of Anchor Stone on Nine to Noon (Feb, 2018)

Takahe review of Anchor Stone (Dec, 2018)

Brannavan Gnanalingam is a novelist, freelance writer and lawyer based in Wellington. He has published eight novels, including Ockham New Zealand Book Awards longlisted A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse and shortlisted Sodden Downstream and Sprigs. His sixth novel Sprigs (Lawrence and Gibson, 2020) also won the 2021 Ngaio Marsh Award. Sprigs explores toxic masculinity in a New Zealand private boys’ school.

For ten years Gnanalingam contributed to the online publication The Lumière Reader during which time he covered film festivals such as Venice, Berlin, Rotterdam, and Cannes. He has also written for The Spinoff, The New Zealand Listener, and The Dominion Post.

Slow Down You’re Here (Lawrence & Gibson, 2022), set in Auckland, New Zealand, is a pacey book full of love and desperation. Murdoch Stephens of the Lawrence & Gibson publishing collective writes ‘Gnanalingam has a gift for realist fiction that is so real that it gives the reader an entirely new view on what might have been considered all too familiar’.

Brannavan’s most recent book, The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat (Lawrence & Gibson, 2024), casts a sidelong glare at the rise of wannabe South Asian demagogues in Western democracies, and imagines a version fit for Aotearoa.

Links

Lawrence & Gibson publishers 

ANZRB review of The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat (April, 2025)

ANZL review of Slow Down You’re Here (Aug, 2022)

Radio NZ interview with the Ngaio Marsh winners (Oct, 2021)

Media announcement: Sprigs wins the 2021 Ngaio Marsh Award (Oct, 2021)

Spinoff review of Sprigs (July, 2020)

Stuff.co.nz article on Brannavan and Sprigs (July, 2020)

Radio NZ interview discussing Sodden Downstream (Oct, 2017)

Radio NZ interview discussing A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse (June, 2016)

Kate Duignan is a fiction writer, poet and reviewer who has published two critically acclaimed books: Breakwater (VUP, 2001) and The New Ships (VUP, 2018). Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in various journals, including Sport, Landfall and takahē. The New Ships was shortlisted for the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize in the 2019 Ockham Book Awards.

Breakwater, Kate’s debut novel, was rated on the New Zealand Bestsellers list. It began as Kate’s MA thesis and an extract from the novel was published in a MA programme anthology Spectacular Babies (2001). Breakwater tells the story of a pregnant nineteen year old, and her friendship with café owner Louise. When Louise’s teenage children are involved in an horrific car accident, the birth of Ella’s baby is not the only matter of life and death for the two women to cope with. The NZ Herald describes Breakwater as an ‘accomplished first novel [that] captures the reader from the first page, thanks to good concise storytelling and characters that are so solidly formed.’

Set in Wellington after the fall of the Twin Towers, and traversing London, Europe, and the Indian subcontinent, The New Ships follows recently widowed Peter Collie adrift in the wake of his wife’s death, his attempts to understand his past, and his roles as a husband, father and son. Multiple narratives are ‘explored and tied up in a neat way and momentum is sustained throughout. Taut and polished with not one word out of place, The New Ships is quietly sorrowful and atmospheric with a beguiling glassy calmness.’ (Stuff review).

Born and raised in Wellington, Duignan completed the MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University International Institute of Modern Letters, graduating with distinction in 2000. She received the Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship (2001), the Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary (2002) and Robert Burns Fellowship at Otago University (2004). She currently lives in Wellington with her partner and three children, and teaches fiction at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University.

Links

Kate Duignan on Twitter

Victoria University Press Kate Duignan

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Wikipedia Kate Duignan

NZ Books review of The New Ships (Sept, 2018)

Stuff review of The New Ships (Sept, 2018)

Spinoff review of The New Ships (June, 2018)

Noted review of The New Ships (May, 2018)

Serie Barford is a poet and short fiction writer of European and Polynesian descent, with a background in performance poetry. She has published six poetry collections: Plea to the Spanish Lady (Hard Echo Press, 1985), Glass Canisters (Hard Echo Press, 1989), Tapa Talk (Huia, 2007), Entangled Islands (Anahera Press, 2015), Sleeping with Stones (Anahera Press, 2021) and Standing on my Shadow (Anahera Press, 2025). Her work is also published in multiple journals and anthologies, such as Black Marks on the White Page, Atlanta Review, Whetu Moana, Niu Voices, Landfall, Poetry New Zealand, Writing the Pacific, and Best New Zealand Poems. Serie explores the Samoan concept, ‘Ia teu le va’ – to cherish or care for relationships within the va, that is, the in between space that holds things together in the Unity-that-is-All.  Entangled Islands (Anahera Press, 2015), is a collection of poetry and prose. Her family is entangled with colonial expansion, suppression, fallout from wars, intermarriage, migration and migrants’ dreams of a better life.  In her Landfall review Siobhan Harvey describes Serie as ‘one of our finest established Pacific Island poets’.

After completing her BA in English and History Serie trained and worked as a secondary school teacher. She has been actively involved in community projects, including a variety of writers’ workshops and a public installation of community writing. Over this time she has held both the Seresin Landfall Residency (2011) and the Michael King Writers’ Centre Pasifika Residency at Signalman’s House, Devonport, Auckland (2018). She currently works as a literacy teacher while continuing to produce her own work.

Serie has read, performed, and interviewed at various festivals, often over a succession of years, including New Zealand’s Going West, Auckland Writers Festival, Wellington Arts and the NZ Poetry Conference, and the Queensland Poetry Festival in Australia. Radio NZ has produced her short stories for broadcast (2010) and TV1 aired her Artsville TVNZ Poem ‘Migration’ filmed by Ian Mune (2006). Serie participated in the Phantom Billstickers Project (2017, 2018). She was part of the Wordsmith tours around schools and performs at public events and festivals, often with various members of the now disbanded Polynation, a poetry troupe of Oceanic poets of mixed heritage.

Tapa Talk (Huia, 2007) has been translated into Ukrainian and was launched by Krok Publishing House, at the International Arsenal Book Festival in Kiev, May 2019.

Serie’s collection, Sleeping with Stones (Anahera Press, 2021), explores moving through loss and grief into Te Ao Marama – The World of Light. Sleeping with Stones was shortlisted for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.

In her most recent collection, Standing on my Shadow (Anahera Press, 2025), this ailing Moana poet ponders her mortality while visiting the devastated yet rejuvenating Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine. Returning home, she stands on the shadow of fear and death: walking within its potentiality, recording experiences and musings, and exploring co-existing understandings of the potency of blood and body tissue within the western medical system. Standing on my Shadow was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Poetry Foundation poet page

Serie on Wikipedia

Anahera Press bio page

ANZRB review of Standing on my Shadow (Dec, 2025)

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

Michael King Writers Centre residency announcement (2018)

Landfall review of Entangled Islands (April, 2016)

Bookseller NZ review of Entangled Islands (Dec, 2015)

Creative Talanoa blog feature: Serie shares her thoughts on her poetry work (June, 2012)

Landfall review of Tapa Talk (July, 2011)

Media announcement of the Seresin Landfall Residency (May, 2011)

Serie Barford’s poetry in Best New Zealand Poems (2006 & 2007)

Niu Voices Auckland Book Launch on the nzepc website (Dec, 2006)

Serie Barford’s writing in Blackmail Press 16

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Jillian Sullivan lives in a small village on a high alpine plateau in Central Otago. Her books include creative non-fiction and poetry, and her latest novel (long-listed for the Michael Gifkins Award) as well as essays and short stories. Of the book Fishing from the Boat Ramp, a Guide to Creating, Joy Cowley wrote: ‘I would call Fishing from the Boat Ramp a must for all writers, whatever their status. I’ve been writing professionally for nearly 50 years and was once Jillian’s mentor. With this book she had become my teacher.’ In 2014 the book was Highly Commended at the London Book Festival for a spiritual book.  Jillian was awarded a Master of Creative Writing, with Distinction, at Massey University in 2011 and teaches writing in New Zealand, in Philadelphia for Rosemont College (creative non-fiction), and in Pennsylvania for the Highlights Foundation. Once the drummer in a woman’s rock band, and now grandmother of nine, her passion is natural building.

Jillian’s numerous awards include: Runner-up in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Award, 2002, the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, 2011 (now the book Parallel); Outstanding Achievement in the Arts Award, Student City 2011 for a novel manuscript (beginning of Recognition); The Takahe Poetry Prize, 2016 (runner-up 2015); Winner of the New Zealand Society of Authors Beatson Fellowship, 2017 for a collection of essays, and the 2018 Juncture Memoir Contest in America. She was also the winner of the 2018 Elyne Mitchell Writing Awards, Non-Fiction (Australia) and winner of the 2019 NZ Heritage Literary Award for poetry.

In her latest book Map for the Heart – Ida Valley Essays (Otago University Press, 2020) Jillian walked the hills and mountains in the Ida Valley where she lives, following the Manuherekia River from the mountains to its confluence with the Clutha/Mata-au. In doing so she explored the ways in which we grow in intimacy with where we live; how our histories, and those of the people who went before us, our experiences of loss and love, our awakening to what is around us, bring us closer to community – closer to a meaningful life.  Map for the Heart is a haunting collection of essays braiding history and memoir with environmentalism, amid an awareness of the seasonal fluctuations of light and wind, heat and snow, plants and creatures, and the lives and work of locals.

Links

Jillian’s website
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Jillian on Twitter
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Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page
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NZ Society of Authors bio page
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Perro Negro: Essay ‘Between Lands’  (Oct, 2020)
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Perro Negro: Five poems and introduction (Oct, 2020)
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Juncture Notes interview ‘Contemplating the Art of the Essay’  (July, 2018)
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Takahé online review of Parallel (2015)
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Landfall review of Parallel: Poetry, what the body can and can’t do, by Siobhan Harvey (2015)

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Judith White is the author of two novels The Elusive Language of Ducks (Penguin Random House, 2013),  Across the Dreaming Night (Penguin Random House, 1999; Oneworld Publications UK 2014; China Times Publishing Company, 2015) and a short story collection Visiting Ghosts (Hodder and Stoughton, 1991; Timeless Tangerine, 1991). She was the winner of the 1988 BNZ Katherine Mansfield Centenary Award; twice winner of the Auckland Star short story competition in 1987 & 1990; placed 3rd in the Sunday Star Times short story competition in 2009; and was awarded the Frank Sargeson Fellowship in 1995. She is widely published in anthologies and many of her short stories have been broadcast by Radio New Zealand. Judith’s two novels Across the Dreaming Night and Visiting Ghosts were both short-listed for the NZ Book Awards. She received Creative New Zealand grants for the writing of all her books. Michael King described as her ‘vividly and hauntingly original’ writing and, as Iain Sharp in the Sunday Star Times noted, is ‘second to none . . . when it comes to depicting states of anxiety, both comic and poignant. And the brilliance with which she enters into her characters’ aberrant states of mind signals a major talent.’

Judith was born in Wellington and went to school in Hastings. She worked as a laboratory technician before travelling extensively overseas. She was the secretary of the Auckland Branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors for several years in the 1980s. She has taught creative writing courses for over two decades, and has worked as a one-on-one mentor for the AUT Creative Writing Masters (MCW) programme, and for the NZSA mentorship scheme. She now lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Links:

Judith’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Penguin Random House author page

Oneworld Publishers author page

Tangerine Publications author page

Landfall review of The Elusive Language of Ducks (2013)

NZ Herald review of The Elusive Language of Ducks (2013)

Radio NZ review of The Elusive Language of Ducks (2013)

Courtney Sina Meredith is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and musician of Samoan, Mangaian, and Irish heritage. Her poetry collection Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick (Beatnik, 2012) and short story collection Tail of the Taniwha (Beatnik, 2016) have both won critical acclaim. Courtney describes her work as an ‘ongoing discussion of contemporary urban life with an underlying Pacific politique’. In describing Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick, critic John Daly-Peoples states that Courtney ‘grapples with the big issues of poverty, conflict, sexism and racism, but also more immediate ones of sex, drinking and eating. All this is rolled into poems which are both serious and frivolous. She is a mixture of performance poet and romantic—a singing Ginsberg and howling Shelley.’

Courtney has participated in numerous national and international festivals, and been selected for a number of international writers’ residencies. She was the first writer of Pasifika descent and first New Zealander to hold the LiteraturRaum Blebitreu Berlin residency (2011). In 2016 she was invited to participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She was also writer in residence at the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska and held a residency at the Sylt Foundation. Courtney has represented New Zealand at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Mexico City Poetry Festival, and the International Indonesian Poetry Festival. She is the winner of the Going West Poetry Slam and the Montana Poetry Slam.

In the 2013 PANZ Book Design Awards, Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick received a Highly Commended in the category of Hachette New Zealand Award for Best Non-Illustrated Book. Tail of the Taniwha was longlisted for the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize. Courtney’s play Rushing Dolls (2010) won the Aotearoa Pasifika Play Competition and received an Adam NZ Best Play by a Woman Playwright award.

Courtney holds a degree in English and Political Studies from the University of Auckland, where she also studied Law and co-edited Spectrum 5 (Penguin).

Her second poetry collection Burst Kisses On The Actual Wind (Beatnik, 2021) is a tapestry of surprising and shifting verse, focused on connection and displacement, the blurring between internal landscapes and longed for realities – we travel with the voice, invited into moments both cinematic and achingly tender.

Links

Courtney’s website

Courtney on Twitter

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Beatnik Publishers author page

NZ Poetry Foundation poet page

Wikipedia

The Wireless interview (Jan, 2018)

Radio New Zealand audio/video performance ‘Dreams’ (2017)

Stuff review of Tail of the Taniwha (2017)

Radio New Zealand interview (2016)

University of Auckland interview on Tail of the Taniwha (2016)

E-Tangata interview (2016)

NZ Poetry Box interview (2014)

Chris Tse is a Wellington poet, editor, writer, actor, musician, and occasional filmmaker and is New Zealand/Aotearoa’s current poet laureate 2022-24. His first full length poetry collection How to be dead in a year of snakes (Auckland UP, 2014) received the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry (2016) and was a finalist in the poetry category at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (2016). His poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction have been recorded for radio and widely published in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies. He is also one of three poets in the joint collection AUP New Poets 4 (Auckland UP, 2011). Landfall describes his work as ‘a kind of kaleidoscopic poetic play’ that is both ‘curious and original’.

Chris has appeared in a number of literary festivals, either reading or as part of a panel, both in New Zealand and Australia, and chaired sessions at the National Young Writers Festival in Newcastle and Wellington Writers and Readers (2018).

His award winning collection How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes revisits the 1905 murder of Joe Kum Yung in Haining Street, Wellington, at the hands of noted racist Lionel Terry. The collection weaves together the voices of Joe, Terry and a chorus of witnesses, and asks readers to consider our collective responsibility to remember the dead and the injustices of our past.

A second full-length collection, HE’S SO MASC was published by Auckland University Press in March 2018. HE’S SO MASC confronts a contemporary world of self-loathing poets and compulsive liars, of youth and sexual identity, and of the author as character. Greg O’Brien describes the book as ‘about life: high life, low life, city life, street life, night life, the love life, the gay life. . .‘Staying Alive’ and how to be alive very much in the present tense.  It is a poetry of the raised voice and the raised room temperature. Give me calamity, he exclaims. Give me soul. Faced with the existential predicaments of the era, the poet proclaims: I choose disco.’

Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa (AUP, 2021), is a recent landmark anthology co-edited by Chris Tse and Emma Barnes. It brings together and celebrates queer New Zealand writers from across the gender and LGBTQIA+ spectrum with a generous selection of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction.

Chris’s spirited and confronting new poetry collection Super Model Minority (AUP, 2022) is a riotous walk through the highs and lows of modern life.

Links:

Chris Tse’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Auckland University Press author page

Wikipedia Chris Tse

Poetry Foundation poet page

Stuff article announcing Chris Tse as poet laureate 2022 (Aug, 2022)

ANZL review of Super Model Minority (April, 2022)

Radio NZ ‘Nine to Noon’ interview (26 March,2018)