Great Things Happening for Christchurch Poets
Great things are happening for Christchurch poets this week:
Victoria Broome’s first individual collection, Big Red Engine, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Kathleen Grattan Award, which is New Zealand’s richest poetry prize. I interviewed Victoria on Women on Air, Plains 96.9 FM earlier in the year and very much enjoyed the poems she read then, so will have my fingers crossed for Victoria ahead of the announcement of the winner on November 21.
Victoria’s second collaborative anthology, which has been put together with her four fellow poets—Catherine Fitchett, Barbara McCartney and Christina Stachurski—in the longstanding group The Poetry Chooks is being launched at South Libray this Saturday at 1 pm. The anthology is titled Flap: The Chook Book 2 and is being launched by well known poet and novelist Fiona Farrell.
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A second Christchurch poet (also non-fiction author and academic), Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, has today been announced as the University of Waikato’s Writer-in-Residence for 2011. Jeffrey plans to work on two projects during his year at Waikato: a new collection of poetry, working title Second Cuts, which will centre round New Zealand’s shearing culture; and a memoir which stems from a photograph of a Kamikaze pilot striking an aircraft carrier with Holman’s father on board.
Jeffrey—who is a fellow member of the Tuesday Poem Blog—is also launching a collection of poetry titled Fly Boy (Steele Roberts), on poems of flight, on Sunday 14 at The Air Force Museum of New Zealand.
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It’s certainly nice to see the book and poetry postives starting to happen again as we deal with the aftermath of our “earthquake spring!”