Alistair Te Ariki Campbell ONZM was a poet, playwright, and novelist. Born in the Cook Islands, he was the son of a Cook Island Māori mother and a Pākehā father, who both died when he was young, leading to him growing up in a New Zealand orphanage. He became a prolific poet and writer, with a lyrical and romantic style tempered by a darkness borne out of his difficult childhood and struggles with mental health as a young adult. Although he wrote about Māori culture from his earliest works, after a revelatory return to the Cook Islands in 1976, his later works increasingly featured Pasifika culture and themes. He received a number of notable awards during his lifetime including the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry and Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement, and is considered one of New Zealand's foremost poets as well as a pioneer of Pasifika literature written in English.
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.
Thomas Allen Monro Curnow was a New Zealand poet and journalist.
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.
Sir Keith Sinclair was a New Zealand poet and historian.
Michele Joy Leggott is a New Zealand poet, and an emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland. She was the New Zealand Poet Laureate between 2007 and 2009.
William Kendrick Smithyman was a New Zealand poet and one of the most prolific of that nation's poets in the 20th century.
Niel Wright is a New Zealand poet, literary critic, bibliographer, publisher, and cultural and political commentator. His major piece of work is his epic poem The Alexandrians, self published in 120 books between 1961 and 2007 and totaling some 36,000 lines. He has since self published 1045 post-Alexandrian poems totaling 8331 lines, of which 681 are triolets. He has also published extensive notes to The Alexandrians.
Michael James Terence Morrissey is a New Zealand poet, short story writer, novelist, editor, feature article writer, book reviewer and columnist. He is the author of thirteen volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, a memoir, two stage plays and four novels and he has edited five other books.
Mark Pirie is a New Zealand poet, writer, literary critic, anthologist, publisher, and editor. He is best known for his Generation X New Zealand anthology The NeXt Wave, which included an 8,000-word introduction (1998), the literary journals JAAM and broadsheet, a book cover photo series of tributes to famous rock albums, and the small press HeadworX Publishers in Wellington, New Zealand.
Leigh Robert Davis was a New Zealand writer who created long poems and large-scale, mixed-media projects in which he worked with painters, designers and composers. He was known for the highly experimental nature of his creative work.
Terry James Locke is a New Zealand poet, anthologist, poetry reviewer and academic.
Alistair Ian Hughes Paterson is a New Zealand writer and poet. A long-time editor of the literary journal Poetry New Zealand, Paterson was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature, in the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours.
Robert McDonald Chapman was a New Zealand political scientist and historian.
Michael Oliver Johnson is a New Zealand author and creative writing teacher. He has written thirteen novels, eleven books of poetry, several short stories featured in critically acclaimed anthologies, and three children's books. Johnson has been awarded two literary fellowships in New Zealand, one with the University of Canterbury, and one with the University of Auckland. His novel Dumb Show won the Buckland Memorial Literary Award for fiction in 1997. He is also a founder of Lasavia Publishing Ltd, a publishing house created in Waiheke Island, New Zealand.
Roger John Horrocks is a New Zealand writer, film-maker, educator and cultural activist.
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.
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.
(age 70)
