Born in Tonga close to the end of the First World War, Gloria Rawlinson was a major New Zealand poet, biographer and editor. After her parents’ divorce, she moved to New Zealand with her mother, and was soon writing poems…

Ruth Bidgood (nee Jones) was born in Seven Sisters (Blaendulais), Vale of Neath, in 1922. Aged seven, she moved to Alberafan; she attended grammar school at Port Talbot, then read English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She served in the…

Sinead Morrissey is the author of five collections of poetry, the last four of which have been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Award. Her most recent, Parallax, won the coveted prize in 2013. Her work has received numerous accolades including the Patrick…

Richard Reeve was born in 1976, and grew up in Dunedin. He has a PhD from the University of Otago centering on New Zealand poetry within the context of twentieth century European continental philosophy (Sein-Language: a Hermeneutic of New Zealand…

Velma Pollard was born in 1937. She grew up in Woodside, a rural Jamaican village, where her mother was a school teacher and her father was a farmer: their interest in the arts was to be one of the main…

Todd Swift was born in Montreal in 1966 and grew up by the St Lawrence Seaway, a landscape that shaped the development of his imagination. He studied Creative Writing at Concordia University, tutored by Gary Geddes and Robert Allen. After…

Sam Hunt is a rare commodity in New Zealand: a ham actor playing to the gallery and willing to go out on a limb; he’s also a highly-effective poet, wise about his craft, while being a national icon. Partly this…

Denis Glover emerged as a poet in New Zealand in the 1930s, one of the new artistic generation of modernists and nationalists. A product of two of New Zealand’s elite secondary schools — Auckland Grammar School and Christ’s College —…

Hone Tuwhare (1922 — 2008) is New Zealand’s pre-eminent Maori poet; his tribal affiliations are with Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Korokoro, Ngāti Tautahi, Te Popoto and Te Uri o Hua.  From a working class background (at fifteen he was apprenticed as…

Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, Cumbria, in 1770, the son of an attorney. Both parents were dead by the time he was thirteen, a loss recorded in the early part of ‘The Prelude’ where he describes with vivid intensity his…

The poems that made Wilfred Owen famous were mostly published after his death in action a week before the end of the First World War. Powerfully influenced by Keats and Shelley, he experimented with verse from childhood, but found his…

John Milton was born in 1608 in Bread Street, Cheapside, the son of a composer and scrivener. He was educated at St Paul’s School and Christ’s College, Cambridge and seemed destined for the priesthood. However, at Cambridge he began to…

Of Rotuman, Tongan and European/Pakeha ancestry, David Eggleton was raised in Auckland and Fiji. As well as his poetry, Eggleton writes extensively on New Zealand art and music, edits New Zealand’s pre-eminent literary journal, Landfall and is an acclaimed literary…

Tanya Shirley is a startlingly bold writer with a particular gift for highlighting the telling detail in her vivid and arresting poems, which variously contain portraits of lovers, colourful eccentrics and family snapshots that capture the elusive magic of childhood…

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, the tenth and youngest child of the schoolmaster of the country town of Ottery St Mary. After the death of his father he attended Christ’s Hospital School: ‘I was reared / In the…

Robert Browning was born in South London in 1812. He was largely self-educated, utilising his father’s extensive library of over six thousand volumes. A voracious reader, Browning would later draw on his wide and sometimes arcane learning in his poetry,…

Christian Karlson Stead (b. Auckland, New Zealand, 1932) Emeritus Professor at Auckland University, is perhaps New Zealand’s most internationally celebrated writer, with a literary life spanning more than fifty years as a poet, novelist, academic and critic. He is the author of eleven novels,…

Kevin Ireland was born Kevin Jowsey in Auckland and now lives just across the harbour in Devonport. A protege of Frank Sargeson, he established a local literary presence as co-founder of Mate before leaving New Zealand for London in 1959….