Hone Peneamine Anatipa Te Pona Tuwhare was a noted Māori New Zealand poet. He is closely associated with The Catlins in the Southland region of New Zealand, where he lived for the latter part of his life.
The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards are literary awards presented annually in New Zealand. The awards began in 1996 as the merger of two literary awards events: the New Zealand Book Awards, which ran from 1976 to 1995, and the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards, which ran from 1968 to 1995.
The Robert Burns Fellowship is a New Zealand literary residency. Established in 1958 to coincide with bicentennial celebrations of the birth of Robert Burns, it is often claimed to be New Zealand's premier literary residency. The list of past fellows includes many of New Zealand's most notable 20th and 21st century writers.
William Manhire is a New Zealand poet, short story writer, emeritus professor, and New Zealand's inaugural Poet Laureate (1997–1998). He founded New Zealand's first creative writing course at Victoria University of Wellington in 1975, founded the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2001, and has been a strong promoter of New Zealand literature and poetry throughout his career. Many of New Zealand's leading writers graduated from his courses at Victoria. He has received many notable awards including a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in 2007 and an Arts Foundation Icon Award in 2018.
David Auld Kilgour is a New Zealand songwriter, musician and recording artist from Dunedin. He first started playing guitar as a teenager in the late 1970s. With brother Hamish he formed The Clean, a group that went on to become one of the principal acts of the Dunedin Sound.
Samuel Percival Maitland Hunt is a New Zealand poet, especially known for his public performances of poetry, not only his own poems, but also the poems of many other poets. He has been referred to as New Zealand's best-known poet.
Priscilla Muriel McQueen is a New Zealand poet and three-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry.
Netherworld Dancing Toys, often simply known as The NDTs, was a New Zealand band from Dunedin formed in 1982. In 1985, their single "For Today" reached number 3 in the New Zealand singles chart.
Charles Orwell Brasch was a New Zealand poet, literary editor and arts patron. He was the founding editor of the literary journal Landfall, and through his 20 years of editing the journal, had a significant impact on the development of a literary and artistic culture in New Zealand. His poetry continues to be published in anthologies today, and he provided substantial philanthropic support to the arts in New Zealand, including by establishing the Robert Burns Fellowship, the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship and the Mozart Fellowship at the University of Otago, by providing financial support to New Zealand writers and artists during his lifetime, and by bequeathing his extensive collection of books and artwork in his will to the Hocken Library and the University of Otago.
Sir Vincent Gerard O'Sullivan was a New Zealand poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, critic, editor, biographer, librettist, and academic. From 1988 to 2004 he was a professor of English literature at Victoria University of Wellington, and in 2013 he was appointed the New Zealand Poet Laureate.
Peter John Olds was a New Zealand poet from Dunedin. He was regarded as being a significant contributor within New Zealand literary circles, in particular, having an influence with younger poets in the 1970s. Olds held the University of Otago Robert Burns Fellowship and was the inaugural winner of the Janet Frame Literary Award. During the 1970s he spent time in the community of Jerusalem with James K Baxter.
Emma Neale is a novelist and poet from New Zealand.
Rhian Gallagher is a poet from New Zealand.
David Howard is a New Zealand poet, writer and editor. His works have been widely published and translated into a variety of European languages. Howard was the co-founder of the literary magazine takahē in 1989 and the Canterbury Poets Collective in 1990. In New Zealand he held the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago in Dunedin in 2013, the Otago Wallace Residency, in Auckland in 2014, and the Ursula Bethell Residency in Christchurch, in 2016. In more recent years he has been the recipient of a number of UNESCO City of Literature Residencies.
John David Dickson was a New Zealand poet. A 1988 recipient of the Robert Burns Fellowship, he published three books of poetry and was the 2000 writer in residence at the University of Waikato.
David Mitchell was a New Zealand poet, teacher and cricketer. In the 1960s and 1970s he was a well-known performance poet in New Zealand, and in 1980 he founded the weekly event "Poetry Live" which continues to run in Auckland as of 2021. His iconic poetry collection Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby (1972) sold well and was a critical success, and his poems have been included in several New Zealand anthologies and journals. A collection of his poems titled Steal Away Boy: Selected Poems of David Mitchell was published in 2010, shortly before his death.
Iain Malcolm Lonie was a British-born New Zealand poet and a historian of ancient Greek medicine. His academic career was spent between New Zealand, Australia and England. He read classics at the University of Cambridge, lectured at universities in both Australia and New Zealand, worked as a research fellow for the Wellcome Trust, and wrote a definitive textbook on the Hippocratic texts On Generation, On the Nature of the Child and Diseases IV.
John Newton is a New Zealand poet, novelist, literary critic and musician. His poetry appears in several major New Zealand anthologies, he has written books about literary history and art, and his first novel was published in October 2020. He was the 2020 Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago.
Tayi Tibble is a New Zealand poet. Her poetry reflects Māori culture and her own family history. Her first collection of poetry, Poūkahangatus (2018), received the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry at the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Both Poūkahangatus and her second collection, Rangikura (2021), have been published in the United States and the United Kingdom, and in 2023 she was the first Māori writer to have work published in The New Yorker.
Siobhan Harvey is a New Zealand and UK author, editor and creative writing lecturer. She writes poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. In 2021, she was awarded the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry.
