New Zealand's many voices are heard in our poetry. Selina Tusitala Marsh's first collection was greeted as a 'challenging new fusion … refreshing and daring'. Kate Camp has published four collections, and in 2011 is enjoying a writer's residency in Berlin. And Bill Manhire, one of our leading contemporary poets, will in 2012 release 'Selected Poems', covering early to recent work.
Hinemoana will be participating in the Transit of Venus poets exchange this year. She is a poet and musician. Her first collection of poetry, mātuhi / needle (2004, Victoria University Press/Perceval Press) was published in New Zealand and in the US. It was described by Bill Manhire as 'a beautiful book of poems about finding your way in the world - a very handsome Global Positioning System'. Her second, kōiwi kōiwi | bone bone (VUP), was launched in 2010. Its poems have been described as 'carefully crafted lyric(s) that sing small parts of the world into shimmering life' (Paula Green).
Hinemoana was appointed 2009 Arts Queensland Poet in Residence, and the following year spent three months in residence at the University of Iowa as part of the International Writing Program. Hinemoana has also released two CDs of poetry, and two albums of original music.
New Zealand Book Council profile
Hinemoana Baker's website
Victoria University Press' profile about Hinemoana Baker
Image by Gregory Crow
Jenny Bornholdt is the leading New Zealand poet of her generation, and is also a notable editor and anthologist. Jenny is in Frankfurt for the 'University of Victoria Writers at the Weltkulturen Museum', an afternoon of readings and discussions with Victoria University writers, plus various events at the New Zealand Pavilion.
She is the author of numerous books of poems, including The Rocky Shore, which won the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 2009. Her most recent is The Hill of Wool, 2011. She has held the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton, France, was named an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate in 2003 and New Zealand Poet Laureate in 2005, and was VUW Writer in Residence in 2010.
The Rocky Shore was one of the NZ Listener’s best books of the year for 2008: ‘These gentle poems lull us with a conversational style that often catalogues the quotidian and the apparently inconsequential. Yet there’s a way in which the casual, chatty, journal-like sections work to disarm the reader deliberately. They heighten both the cruel invasions of crisis and loss and the sweet bursts of insight that suddenly surge forward from the page, carried on bright image or extended metaphor. These six long poems “climb on down” under the surface of things to touch the wellsprings of feeling and memory.’
New Zealand Book Council biography
Kate Camp is currently living in Berlin after being awarded a Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency. She has been described as one of New Zealand’s most startling and original poets and is also a highly regarded literature reviewer on radio.
Kate Camp has published four collections of poems: Unfamiliar Legends, Realia, Beauty Sleep and The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls which was shortlisted for the 2010 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award and won the 2011 NZ Post Book Award for Poetry. Unfamiliar Legends won an award at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Her poems are regularly selected for Best New Zealand Poems and appear in a wide range of New Zealand magazines.
Lydia Wevers writes: “What I like about Camp’s poems is her observations on the world we live in are recognisable, immensely enjoyable, comic but never pointless.”
Kate’s Klassics is based on her radio reviews of ten classic works of literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Reviewer Andy Armitage noted “the agreeable blend of intelligence, research, anecdote and humour she brings to her subject”.
NZ Book Council biography
@PoetKateCamp
Kate Camp's Tumblr
Work in the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls
Victoria University Press
Available
64 pages, 210 x 170 mm, Paperback
World rights available, excluding New Zealand
Rights enquiries: Fergus Barrowman, fergus.barrowman@vuw.ac.nz
For more information on this publisher, please visit www.victoria.ac.nz/vup
Glenn will be participating in the Transit of Venus poets exchange this year. He is a doctor, poet and children's writer. His first poetry collection, The Art of Walking Upright, won Best First Book of Poetry at the 2000 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. In 2003 he won the Poetry Category and also became the first poet to be awarded the coveted Montana Readers' Choice Award. He has written several children’s books and has been the convener of the New Zealand Post Book Awards. In 2004, Colquhoun was the recipient of the Prize in Modern Letters.
New Zealand Book Council profile
Steele Roberts Publishers profile on Glenn Colquhoun
Anna Jackson is a poet and fiction writer who is in Frankfurt for the 'University of Victoria Writers at the Weltkulturen Museum', an afternoon of readings and discussions with Victoria University writers, plus poetry events at the New Zealand Pavilion.
Her writing has appeared in journals and anthologies, and she has also published several collections of poetry in which the subject of family and domestic life is explored. The most recent, (Auckland University Press, 2011) has been shortlisted for the New Zealand Post Book Award. Jackson received a 1999 Louis Johnson New Writers’ Bursary and was 2001 Waikato University Writer in Residence. She teaches English literature at Victoria University of Wellington.Thicket
As a critic, she is co-author of A Made Up Place: New Zealand in Young Adult Fiction (Victoria University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Floating Worlds: Essays on Contemporary New Zealand Fiction (Victoria University Press, 2012).
New Zealand Book Council biography
Anna Jackson at Auckland University Press
Jan Kemp is a poet and accomplished performer of her work. She first published in NZ with the Freed group in the late sixties and was the only woman poet in The Young NZ Poets (Heinemann, 1973) and on the Four Poets Tour (1979). Graduating Dip. Tchg., 1972 and M.A.(English) in 1974, she travelled & worked in the South Pacific, in Fiji and the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), as well as in Canada, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. For many years she taught English at Hong Kong University and then at NUS in Singapore before first moving to Germany in 1994 where she studied Germanistik and Italian at the Goethe University and taught there for a semester as a Lecturer in Creative Writing.
With her German husband, Jan spent 8 years in NZ from 1999. During this time she founded and collected the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive 2004 - 40CDs of recordings of 171 NZ poets, some of which were published in the 3vol/CD series Classic, Contemporary & New NZ Poets in Performance in 2006/7/8, an update on the first archive she jointly collected in 1974, the Waiata Archive with its publication 3LPs NZ Poets Read Their Work (Waiata Recordings).
Visit the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive website
Among many festivals she has attended, Jan was a NZ delegate to the South Pacific Festival of Arts in Port Moresby in 1980 and was awarded a PEN-Stout Fellowship at Victoria University in 1991. In 2005 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Literature. Jan was a Writer in Residence at Chateau de Lavigny, Switzerland in September 2008.
Her first books Against the Softness of Woman (1976), Diamonds & Gravel (1979), Ice-breaker Poems (1980) are now O/P, as is The Sky's Enormous Jug (2001). The Other Hemisphere (1991) is still available from <www.tranzlit.com> as is Only One Angel (from University of Otago Press, 2001). In 2006 a CD Jan Kemp Reading Her Work came out with The Poetry Archive (U.K.). In July 2012 her work of 2 years as project manager for 25 NZ Poets for the P.A. was completed with selections from her NZ archives going online at www.poetryarchive.org launched in London on July 6th.
Her 2006 collection Dantes Heaven engages with her eight year return home to NZ after 25 years away, imaginatively seen through her own, but also other eyes and voices, including those of Dante's Beatrice. Now entitled Dantes Himmel (transl. by Dieter Riemenschneider), it will be released at the Frankfurt Bookfair in a bilingual edition complete with a CD of the poet reading a selection in English and German, a language she now also speaks fluently. Returning to settle near Frankfurt in 2007, she & Dieter have now made Germany their permanent home.
Jan's latest book: Voicetracks (2012, Puriri Press & Tranzlit) has just been released in New Zealand and will be launched in London at the NZ Studies Network Inaugural Conference at Birbeck, Univ. of London on 6th July. Jan will read from both new books at the Frankfurt Bookfair and its associated reading venues.
Publishers:
VAT Verlag André Thiele, www.vat-mainz.de
Puriri Press, Auckland, <dennyjhs@xtra.co.nz>
Tranzlit, Kronberg im Taunus <www.tranzlit.com>, <tranzlit@iconz.co.nz>
Ole Maiava is a member of the Banana Boat Writers Group and is also an independent film maker, actor, broadcaster, musician, published poet and short story writer. Ole describes himself as a forty-third generation Samoan and first generation New Zealander.
Poet Bill Manhire is widely recognised as among the finest New Zealand poets of his generation. He is the winner of numerous awards and residencies and has been a significant figure in teaching and promoting poetry and literature in New Zealand.
His work has won the New Zealand Book Awards poetry prize five times, in 1977, 1985, 1992, 1996 and 2006. He has edited numerous anthologies of poems, essays, and short stories, including Some Other Country, and published a collection of essays and interviews.
He was the inaugural Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate (1996/97), and inaugural Antarctic Arts Fellow Invited Artist (1997/98). In 2005 he was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit and honoured as an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate. He received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in 2007.
Manhire is currently the director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University.
His forthcoming Selected Poems will survey his long career.
NZ Book Council Biography
Arts Foundation Profile
Works in the NZ Electronic Text Centre
Works in the NZ Electronic Poetry Centre
Selected Poems
Victoria University Press
Available July 2012 Approx 120 pages, 210 x 138 mm, Paperback
World rights available, excluding New Zealand
Rights enquiries: Fergus Barrowman, fergus.barrowman@vuw.ac.nz
For more information about this publisher, please visit www.victoria.ac.nz/vup
Poet Courtney Meredith was born in 1986, she has a degree in English and Political Studies from the University of Auckland, where she also studied Law and co-edited Spectrum 5.
She was the writer in residence for the LiteraturRaum Bleibtreu Berlin 2011. Courtney was the first New Zealander, the first Pacific person and the youngest artist to be selected. While in Germany, she featured in Mau Theatre’s world premiere of Le Savali. She describes her works as an on-going discussion of contemporary urban life with an underlying Pacific politique.
Chris will be participating in the Transit of Venus poets exchange this year. She is a poet, editor and educator. Her collections of poetry include Husk (2002) and The Blind Singer (2009). She has also published an eccentric biographical dictionary that samples the lives of both real and fictional characters called Brief Lives (2006). Price has won and been shortlisted for several nationally recognized literary awards, and in 2008 she was the Auckland University Writer in Residence at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. She teaches creative writing full time at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington.
Robert Sullivan (Nga Puhi / Kai Tahu / Galway) has won several New Zealand literary awards for his children’s writing, poetry and editing. His books include Cassino: City of Martyrs (2010), Shout Ha! to the Sky (2010), Star Waka (latest ed. 2011), and Weaving Earth and Sky (2002) illustrated by Gavin Bishop. Robert grew up in South Auckland and is now the head of the School of Creative Writing at Manukau Institute of Technology.
