Academy of New Zealand Literature

Paula Green is a poet, reviewer, anthologist, children’s author, book-award judge and blogger. She has published fourteen poetry collections, including four for children. In 2017, Paula received the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry and was also admitted to The New Zealand Order of Merit for Services to Poetry and Literature. In 2025 she was awarded the prestigious Storylines Margaret Mahy Medal and Lecture Award for her work and writing in children’s literature. Paula Green is an extraordinary poet,’ writes Anna Jackson, ‘who writes like no one else, with a lyrical intensity combined with a radical simplicity’.

‘There is,’ The Otago Daily Times wrote of her poetry collection The Baker’s Thumbprint, ‘a glowing, throbbing beauty in this one. This little book seems to pulse with warmth and sense of calm, comfort and joy. Green this time around has blown open the doors and taken an endless rainbow of excitement and imagination. All the way through you think, “Wow, wonder what’s coming next?” Green once said, “There is a magical reaction between something I see, hear, experience, feel or remember and the words in my head. In that magical moment, I find the seeds of a poem. And it is of course completely unpredictable.” The Baker’s Thumbprint is neat.’

Co-written with Harry Ricketts, her book 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry was short-listed for the 2010 NZ Post Book Awards. She runs two blogs: NZ Poetry Box and NZ Poetry Shelf. She edited the much lauded A Treasury of New Zealand Poetry for Children (Random House). The Letter Box Cat and other poems (Scholastic) won Children’s Choice at the 2015 NZ Book Awards while her children’s books have won a number of Storylines Notable Book Awards.

Paula has a Doctorate in Italian and was Literary Fellow at The University of Auckland (2005). She is a regular guest in New Zealand Literary festivals and performs and undertakes workshops in schools from Year 0-13. She established and runs two blogs, NZ Poetry Shelf and NZ Poetry Box.

She published three books in 2019: The Track (poetry, Seraph Press), Groovy Fish and other poems (children’s poetry, The Cuba Press), Wild Honey: Reading NZ Women’s Poetry (nonfiction, Massey University Press).

In her most recent work The Venetian Blind Poems (The Cuba Press, 2025), one of Aotearoa’s leading poets and poetry advocates offers glimpses into a life stripped bare by illness, through poems about living with and beyond cancer.

Links

Paula Green’s NZ Poetry Shelf website and blog

Twitter:@PaulaJoyGreen

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

The Cuba Press author page

Massey University Press author page

Penguin Random House author page 

Seraph Press author page

ANZRB review of The Venetian Blind Poems (Dec, 2025)

Auckland Libraries blog: Paula Green talks with Karen Craig about Wild Honey (Aug, 2019)

NZListener: Sally Blundell reviews Wild Honey (Aug, 2019)

The Sapling interviews Paula Green (Aug, 2019)

Paula Green reading poetry at Unity Books  (Aug, 2017)

Stephanie de Montalk is the author of a biography, a novel, a memoir and five books of poetry. She has an MA (Dist.) and a PhD in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington. A former nurse, documentary filmmaker and member of the NZ Film and Literature Board of Review, she came to writing late, in her fifties, as family and work commitments lessened. Since that time she has been the recipient of multiple awards. Guy Allan observed: ‘Stephanie de Montalk writes with unusual grace,’ and Gerry Webb wrote that her work is ‘relaxed, articulate, knowledgeable,’ and ‘meticulously observant’. In 2003, Stephanie suffered an accident resulting in permanent nerve damage and intractable pain. From this point on, her writing has explored exile, isolation and constraint. Reviewing her treatment of these themes in Vivid Familiar (poetry, VUP, 2009) Hugh Roberts wrote: ‘de Montalk continues to grip us … with the probing intelligence and nervous energy of her language’.

Stephanie has been published in literary journals in New Zealand and abroad. Her accolades include joint winner of both the VUW Prize for Original Composition and the Novice Writers’ Award in the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Awards (1997), the Jessie Mackay Award for the Best First Book of Poetry at the Montana NZ Book Awards (2001), a Top Ten and a Top Four NZ Book (2001), a Favourite NZ Book (2002), a Best NZ Book (2009), a Best Book (2014) and a Nigel Cox/Unity Books Award (2015). In 2005, Stephanie was the Victoria University Writer-in-Residence.

The poems in Stephanie’s new collection As the Trees Have Grown (2023) engage with the world as if through a window – cloaked, distanced, and guided by the movements of the seasons, the weather, and always, trees. As Stephanie seeks a cure to the life-changing limitations of her physical self, she finds something close to solace in dreaming.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Victoria University Press author page

‘Life on the Opium Couch’: an interview for Folks Magazine (2016)

Interview with Stephanie on National Radio (2014)

For publications, further reviews and excerpts visit Stephanie de Montalk’s website

Geoff Chapple writes on the New Zealand outdoors. He founded Te Araroa, New Zealand’s 3,000-km long trail. His book Te Araroa: One Man Walks His Dream won Geoff the Montana Book Awards Environment category in 2003. The power of words: he claims its writing converted the trail from a reckless dream to reality. His biography of Rewi Alley, the New Zealander who founded peasant schools in China, went through three editions, and his account of the widespread civil disorder that accompanied the visit to New Zealand of an apartheid-era Springbok rugby team, 1981: The Tour, is the staple text for that event. He strays sometimes into fiction and songs, writing the libretto for an opera, movie scripts (including a co-writing effort with Vincent Ward of The Navigator), and in 2007, the stage play, Hatch – a hit of that year’s Auckland Arts Festival. His book Terrain – Travels Through a Deep Landscape records his encounters with New Zealand geologists amidst strange and often threatening landscapes. Geoff was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to tramping, tourism and literature in the 2012 Queen’s Birthday and Diamond Jubilee Honours List.

‘Chapple writes such distinctive prose – charged, mystical, funny, enthusiastic for life’ – wrote The Spinoff when admitting Chapple’s book South to its 100 best-ever NZ non-fiction books. ‘This account of cruising around the South Island with his wife and kids in a six-tonne Bedford is a supreme piece of New Zealand travel writing.’

‘A theatrical tour de force.’  NZ Herald review of Hatch.

‘He’s taken the study of New Zealand’s geological history – potentially impenetrably dense and dull to a layperson – and turned mudstone into a gem of a book.’ Otago Daily Times review of Terrain.

Links

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Random House Books author page

Bridget Williams Books author page

Michael King Writers’ Centre advisor page

Wikipedia

Radio New Zealand interview (Feb, 2016)

NZ Herald review of Terrain (Aug, 2015)

Poet, reviewer and essayist, Kate Camp published her first collection of poetry, Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars (Victoria UP, 1998) to acclaim, winning the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry at the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. She has proceeded to publish a further seven collections, establishing her at the vanguard of New Zealand poetry. Her work is known for its wide-ranging and eclectic subject matter, its technical control and its musicality, with pop culture, high culture, the domestic confessional, close observation and found language featured as recurring elements. In 2022 Kate published her short fiction memoir You Probably Think This Song is About You in which she shares experiences as diverse as bad relationships, misheard songs, the fallibility of memory and the wrong turns we take. Reviewer Catherine Chidgey comments that ‘Kate’s essays shine with wit, intelligence, and a humanity that is both intimate and universal.’

Kate’s work has been widely published, appearing in an array of New Zealand and international journals and magazines, including Landfall, NZ Listener, New Zealand Books, North & South, Sport, Takahē and Turbine. She has a regular slot on Radio NZ with Kim Hill reviewing classic literature, and has had poems selected for Best New Zealand Poems and The Best of the Best New Zealand Poems.

In her NZ Herald review of Snow White’s Coffin, Paula Green writes: ‘Camp strolls through the world in her poetry shoes, but it is not always physical travel. She draws upon books read, poems loved, paintings witnessed, as well as the sky and ground. These magical, knotty works react to a fragile world, and Camp navigates the light along with the dark. Terrific.’

Kate has been shortlisted and winner of many prestigious awards. In 2006 and 2004 Kate was shortlisted for the Glenn Schaeffer Prize in Modern Letters. In 2011, The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls won the New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry. In the same year, she was awarded the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency. Her collection, Snow White’s Coffin, was written during her experience and was a finalist in 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards. She was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship in November 2016.

In her collection, Makeshift Seasons (2025), Kate is ever alert to the stories unfolding all around us and inside our own bodies. The poems move between distant planets and Chappies Dairy, between Mont-Saint-Michel and the lighthouse in Island Bay, with every moment, every feeling, every conviction on the edge of becoming another. Like the plumber who can hear water running deep underground, Makeshift Seasons is a book of extraordinarily sharp sensing and knowing.

In her most recent book, Leather & Chains (2026) Kate turns her poet’s eye on her 1986 diary. This is a unique follow-up to her memoir You Probably Think This Song Is About You. These entries – over 100 reproduced in full – are a time capsule of a very different era. The Kate Camp of today responds to the blithe accounts of sex, drugs and risk-taking with horror and admiration.

Kate was born, and lives, in Wellington.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Victoria University Press author page

NZEPC poet page

ANZRB review of Makeshift Seasons (April, 2025)

Radio New Zealand interview discussing How to Be Happy Though Human (Aug, 2020)

On Magazine interview (2016)

Dominion Post article and interview (May, 2013)

Radio New Zealand interview discussing Snow White’s Coffin (May, 2013)

Hinemoana Baker is a published poet, a musician and recording artist, teacher of creative writing and occasional broadcaster. She was the 2016  Creative New Zealand’s Berlin Writer-in-Residence.

Hinemoana’s first book of poetry, mātuhi | needle, was co-published in New Zealand and the US in 2004. Actor, writer and artist Viggo Mortensen’s publishing house Perceval Press co-published the book, which features the paintings of Ngāi Tahu artist Jenny Rendall. Her first album, puāwai (Jayrem Records, 2004), was a finalist for the New Zealand Music Awards and the APRA Silver Scrolls Māori Language award.

Her second collection of poetry, kōiwi kōiwi | bone bone (Victoria UP), was launched in Wellington in 2010 followed by waha | mouth (Victoria UP, 2014). She co-edited the anthology Kaupapa: New Zealand Poets, World Issues in 2007, and has released four more CDs of music and poetry.

Hinemoana’s most recent collection Funkhaus (Victoria UP, 2020) is currently shortlisted for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Links

Hinemoana’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Victoria University Press author page

Wikipedia

Poetry Foundation author page

Karlo Mila is an award-winning New Zealand poet, Fulbright Scholar, researcher, academic and author of Tongan, Samoan and European descent.  In 2016 she was awarded the Contemporary Pacific Art Award at the Creative New Zealand Arts Pasifika Awards and in 2017 received the New Zealand Order of Merit both for services to the Pacific community and as a poet. Both personal and political, urban and island, Karlo’s poetry is rooted in concerns of identity, voice, migration and family. Of the challenges Pacific writers face, Karlo says: ‘We are barely in print…We are constantly fed a diet of other peoples’ stories and experiences…We must be the protagonists wrought by our own pens, not shadows in other people’s stories.’

Karlo’s first book of poetry, Dream Fish Floating (Huia, 2005), won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards (2006). Her second work  A Well Written Body (Huia, 2008) was published in collaboration with German-born artist Delicia Sampero and is a combination of text and image. Goddess Muscle (Huia, 2020) her most recent collection, spans work written over a decade. The poems are both personal and political, defining issues such as racism, poverty, violence, climate change and power on Pasifika peoples, Aotearoa and beyond, but also love, identity, culture, and community. Goddess Muscle was longlisted for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Karlo represented Tonga at the 2012 Cultural Olympiad Poetry event Parnassus Festival in London, and was recipient of the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer’s Residency (2015). Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including including Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English and Best New Zealand Poems 2003, 2005 ,2006 and 2017.

Born in 1974 in Rotorua, Karlo was raised in Palmerston North where she completed her undergraduate degree before working in Auckland in medical research. After ten years, she returned to Massey University where she completed her PhD in Sociology researching the identity and wellbeing of the New Zealand- born Pacific population. She currently lives in Palmerston North.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre poet page

Wikipedia

Huia Press author page

Radio New Zealand interview on the rise of Pacifica poetry (Nov, 2016)

Kelly Ana Morey is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. She has published four novels, poems, numerous short stories, a childhood memoir and three social histories.

Born in 1968 of Ngati Kuri, Te Rarawa and Te Aupouri descent, she spent much her childhood in Papua New Guinea. In New Zealand, she began her writing career as the recipient of the Todd Young Writers’ Bursary (2003). That same year, her first novel Bloom (Penguin, 2003) won the Hubert Church (New Zealand) first novel prize. The judges described it as ‘a wonderfully accomplished first novel that reads like the work of a veteran writer rather than a first book author’. Her second, Grace is Gone (Penguin, 2004) was a finalist for the Kiriyama Award for Fiction (USA). In 2005, she was the recipient of the inaugural Janet Frame Award for Fiction. Kelly Ana writes from she calls the ‘various ghosts and characters she carts around in the bottomless kete of her imagination’.

Kelly Ana has completed a BA in English and an MA in contemporary Maori art.  In 2014, she was awarded the Maori Writer’s Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. The resulting novel, Daylight Second, she believes is the first New Zealand literary novel about the racehorse Phar Lap. Daylight Second was published 1 October 2016.

She was recently awarded the 2023 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship and  used her residency to work on her sixth novel, Soft Bones, which looks at the everyday lives of five generations of Māori women.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Penguin Books NZ author page

Awa Press author page

Huia author page

Awa Press author page

NZ Herald article on the Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship (Dec, 2023)

Stuff.co.nz interview regarding Daylight Second (Sept, 2016)

Born in Hawera in 1943, Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most critically acclaimed poets. Of her twelve collections of poetry, four have been finalists for the New Zealand Book Awards. Her first book, It has no Sound & is Blue (1987), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Time Published Poet. Her collections are evocative and original and are influenced by the natural world, women’s experience, spirituality and social justice. Her work has been described as ‘at once meditative and resolute.’ In addition to poetry, a number of her publications feature letters and prose. A reviewer of her collection, Ocean and Stone (2015), has said that ‘few writers have the skill to return to the land and the sea with such originality and genuine knowing …the experience of reading Hawken is to be lulled and then shocked awake’. In 2007, Dinah was named the winner of the biennial Lauris Edmond Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry in New Zealand. In 2025 Dinah also received the CNZ Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for poetry.

A trained physiotherapist, counsellor and social worker, Dinah wrote her first collection in New York while studying for her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College and also working with people who were homeless and mentally ill. Dinah also worked for several years at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University, convening a course called ‘Writing the Landscape.’  In 2008 she was commissioned by Chamber Music New Zealand to write seven poems for a New Zealand performance of Haydn’s ‘Seven last words from the cross’.

The poems in Dinah’s Sea-light illuminate the forces – personal, ecological and political – that are re-forming our lives. They light upon small details in their search for peace and connection in an unsettled world. And they are always open to what the sea, in its persistent breaking and reconvening, can teach us.

In Faces and Flowers: Poems for Patricia France (2024) Dinah responds to the works of Dunedin artist Patricia France, who began painting in her fifties while living at Ashburn Hall, a psychiatric institution in Dunedin. In her intimate, unrhymed sonnets, Dinah addresses a friend she never met, seeking to make a connection across time with the artist and her world.

Her most recent collection, Peace & Quiet (2026), explores the place poetry holds in times of ecological and political turbulence. Powerful and illuminating, these poems show that peace, gentleness and reflection are a form of resistance.

Dinah lives in Paekakariki on the Kapiti Coast.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre poet page

Victoria University Press author page

Holloway Press author page

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

ANZRB review of Faces and Flowers (Nov, 2024)

Radio NZ review by Harry Ricketts of Faces and Flowers (Oct, 2024)

Sydney Review of Books review of There is No Harbour (Nov, 2019)

takahē review of Ocean and Stone (April, 2016)

Apirana Taylor is from the Ngati Porou, Te Whanau a Apanui, and Ngati Ruanui tribes, and also Pakeha heritage. He is a prolific poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, story teller, actor, painter, and musician. His poems and short stories are frequently studied in schools at NCEA and tertiary level. His poetry and prose has been published nationally and internationally and translated into several languages. He has also written for radio and television. Apirana’s latest book of poetry, The Breathing Tree, was published by Canterbury University Press in 2014. His second novel, Five Strings (Anahera Press, 2017), is a poignant and humorous love story about two people at the absolute bottom of the social heap. The NZ Herald states that in Five Strings Apirana ‘writes in an almost unique fusion of savage narrative threaded with incantations, song and poetry’. In 2024 Apirana was awarded a Creative New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry.

Apirana has been Writer-in-Residence at Massey and Canterbury Universities, Rangi Ruru, St Andrews College and Hagley High School. He has been invited several times to India and Europe to read his poetry and tell his stories, and to national and international festivals, including in Medillen, Colombia. He travels to schools, libraries, tertiary institutions and prisons throughout New Zealand to read his poetry, tell his stories, and take creative writing workshops.

A quote written by Fiona Farrell on the back of Apirana Taylor’s poetry book A Canoe in Midstream (Canterbury UP, 2009) describes Apirana and his work:

Apirana Taylor is seer and shapeshifter, poet and warrior:

strength and love find equal balance in verse that is

alternatively raging and lyrical, dramatic and

meditative, haka and haiku ….

.

Links

Apirana’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Canterbury University Press author page

Anahera Press author page

Wikipedia

Creative New Zealand announcement of Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (Dec, 2024)

Radio NZ interview and poetry reading (June, 2019)

Noted review of Five Strings (June, 2017)

NZ Herald review of Five Strings (May, 2017)

Born in New Zealand in 1961, London-living Anthony McCarten is an award winning film-maker, novelist and playwright. He is an Honorary Literary Fellow of the New Zealand Society of Authors in ‘Recognition of Outstanding Literary Achievement’.

Anthony’s novels have been translated into 14 languages. His first, Spinners, was voted one of the top ten novels of 2000 by Esquire magazine. In 2005, his second novel, The English Harem, became an international best seller. His third, Death Of A Superhero, won the 2008 Austrian Youth Literature Prize and was a finalist for the 2008 German Youth Literature Prize. A major motion picture, from McCarten’s screenplay adaptation, was filmed in 2011. His latest, and seventh novel, funny girl, a fictional account of the world first Muslim female stand-up comedian, has just been published to acclaim.

As a film maker, Anthony has written five feature films and directed two himself.  All were screened internationally. Theory of Everything, (2014) was nominated for five Academy Awards, including two for McCarten, for Best Film (as producer) and Best Adapted Screenplay. He won two BAFTA awards in the same categories for the same film.

McCarten received early international success with his play Ladies Night. Translated into twelve languages, it remains New Zealand’s most commercially successful play of all time. In 2001, it won France’s premiere theatre award for comedy, the Molière Prize. In addition, he is the author of eleven other widely performed stage plays.

Anthony now divides his time between Los Angeles and London.

Links:

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Penguin Random House author page 

Playmarket playwright page

NZ OnScreen bio page

Youtube: Closeup Writers Round Table with Anthony McCarten discussing The Two Popes (Dec, 2019)