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Profile
Vincent O’Sullivan is one of New Zealand’s most eminent writers
and scholars. Internationally renowned for editing Katherine Mansfield’s
letters, he is also an award-winning novelist and playwright. The jewel in his
literary crown is his poetry, which reveals a powerful intellect brought to
bear on a world of continual change and curiosity.
Selected published works
Let the River Stand, 1993; Believers
to the Bright Coast, 1998; Long Journey to
the Border: A Life of John Mulgan, 2003; Pictures by Goya and Other Stories, 2006.
Vincent O'Sullivan's poetry can be found here.
Publishers
Victoria University Press www.vuw.ac.nz/vup
Penguin Books New Zealand www.penguin.co.nz
Biography
Vincent O’Sullivan was born in Auckland in 1937. He graduated from
the Universities of Auckland and Oxford and has lectured in the English departments
of Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Waikato.
O’Sullivan is the author of two novels: Let the River Stand,
which won the 1994 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and Believers to the
Bright Coast, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Tasmania Pacific Region
Prize. He has also written many plays and collections of short stories and,
of course, poetry. His collection Seeing You Asked (Victoria University
Press, 1998) won Best Book of Poetry at the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards,
the same year that Believers to the Bright Coast was runner up for
the Deutz Medal for Fiction.
His 2001 collection of poetry Lucky Table was shortlisted in the poetry
section of the 2001 The Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Nice morning for It,
Adam was published to acclaim in 2004 and won the poetry category of the 2005
Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
O’Sullivan has a well-earned reputation as a thoughtful and incisive
editor and critic and was joint editor of the five-volume The Collected
Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1984) and has edited a number of major
anthologies. His biography of New Zealand writer John Mulgan, called Long
Journey to the Border, was published in 2003.
Vincent O’Sullivan has been awarded numerous writer residencies and research
fellowships at Australasian universities. He spent 1983 as resident playwright
at Downstage Theatre, Wellington. In 1994, he was the Meridian Energy Katherine
Mansfield Fellow in Menton, France. He was appointed Director of Victoria University
of Wellington’s Stout Research Centre in 1997 and is now Emeritus Professor
of English at Victoria University of Wellington. O’Sullivan was made a
Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2000 Queen’s
Birthday Honours. In 2004, he was awarded the Creative New Zealand Michael King
Writer’s Fellowship to work on a major project. Vincent O'Sullivan was honoured with the 2006 Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement in poetry. He is the 2009 resident at the Michael King Writers Centre in Auckland.
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