Prof Bill Manhire

Director,
International Institute of Modern Letters

On this page:

• Introduction
• Further Reading About Bill Manhire

Introduction

Bill was New Zealand's inaugural Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate, and is a four-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for poetry.

His prizewinning fiction has been published in Britain and the USA, and he is also well known for such bestselling anthologies as 100 New Zealand Poems, Six by Six, and Some Other Country.

His Collected Poems was published by Victoria University Press and Carcanet.

In 2004 he held the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship in Menton.

In 2005 he was made an arts laureate by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, and received an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from the University of Otago.

In 2007 he received the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry.

Publications in the last 2-3 years include an anthology of imaginative writing about Antarctica, The Wide White Page; a collection of poems, Lifted, which won the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Award for poetry; and the anthology 121 New Zealand Poems. A new collection of poems, The Victims of Lightning, was released in 2010, as was the Buddhist Rain jazz CD, a collaboration with composer Norman Meehan.

Bill was joint project leader with Paul Callaghan of Are Angels OK?, a sci-art collaboration between leading New Zealand writers and physicists, while 2011 sees the release of an anthology based on the International Institute of Modern Letter's Best New Zealand Poems website, co-edited with Damien Wilkins.

Further Reading About Bill Manhire