Peter Bland (born 12 May 1934 in Scarborough, North Yorkshire) [1] is a British-New Zealand poet and actor.
He emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 20 and graduated from the Victoria University of Wellington.
He worked as a radio producer for the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation.
He became closely associated with the Wellington Group which included James K. Baxter and Louis Johnson. He worked in theatre, as co-founder and artistic director of Downstage Theatre from 1964–68. [2]
He returned to Britain in 1970 for a short time but now lives in Auckland, New Zealand. [3]
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: CS1 maint: others (link)Alistair Te Ariki Campbell ONZM was a poet, playwright, and novelist. Born in the Cook Islands, Campbell 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.
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.
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.
Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead is a New Zealand composer. She is of Māori Ngāi Te Rangi descent. Her Māori heritage has been an important influence on her composing.
Jacqueline Cecilia Sturm was a New Zealand poet, short story writer and librarian. She was one of the first Māori women to complete an undergraduate university degree, at Victoria University College, followed by a Masters of Arts degree in philosophy. She was also the first Māori writer to have her work published in an English anthology. Her short stories were published in several collections and student magazines in the 1950s and early 1960s, and in 1983 a women's publishing collective printed a collection of her short stories as The House of the Talking Cat. She continued to write short stories and poetry well into the early 2000s, and is regarded today as a pioneer of New Zealand literature.
Kurt-Friedrich Gänzl is a New Zealand writer, historian and former casting director and singer best known for his books about musical theatre.
Glenn Morton Colquhoun is a New Zealand poet and general practitioner.
Downstage Theatre was a professional theatre company in Wellington, New Zealand, that ran from 1964 to 2013. For many years it occupied the purpose-built Hannah Playhouse building. Former directors include Sunny Amey, Mervyn Thompson, and Colin McColl.
O.E. Middleton was a New Zealand writer of short stories, described as belonging to the vernacular critical realist tradition of Frank Sargeson. He was the brother of noted New Zealand novelist Ian Middleton, and like him also blind from middle age. Mentored by Frank Sargeson in Auckland in the late 1950s, he moved to Dunedin to take up the Robert Burns Fellowship (1970) at the University of Otago.
Robert Sullivan is a Māori poet, academic and editor. His published poetry collections include Jazz Waiata (1990), Star Waka (1999) and Shout Ha! to the Sky (2010). His books have a postmodern quality and "explore social and racial subjects, and aspects of Māori tradition and history."
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.
Kevin Mark Ireland was a New Zealand poet, short story writer, novelist and librettist.
The Hannah Playhouse is a theatre venue situated on the corner of Courtenay Place and Cambridge Terrace in central Wellington, New Zealand. The Hannah Playhouse was given by Sheilah Winn and named after her grandfather, Robert Hannah, a very successful businessman. It was carefully designed and built to house Downstage Theatre.
Warren Ambrose Dibble was a New Zealand poet and playwright.
Robert Lord was the first New Zealand professional playwright. He was one of the first New Zealand playwrights to have plays produced abroad since Merton Hodge in the 1930s.
Saradha Koirala is a New Zealand poet and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of three poetry collections and two young adult novels. Koirala also writes literature reviews and has interviewed international authors and covered events such as the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival. She was the convening judge for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Roma Potiki is a New Zealand poet, playwright, visual artist, curator, theatre actor and director, as well as a commentator on Māori theatre. She is of Te Rarawa, Te Aupōuri and Ngāti Rangitihi descent. As well as being a published poet, her work is included in the permanent collection of the Dowse Art Museum.
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.
Judith Muriel Lonie was an Australian poet. She published one volume of poetry during her lifetime, with a second published posthumously; her poetry was often about personal or intimate subjects but treated in an impersonal way. Her poems have been included in several anthologies. Her husband, the New Zealand poet Iain Lonie, wrote three volumes of poetry about the intense grief he felt after her death.
Peter Bland poet.