Profile
Anne Kennedy is a novelist, award-winning short story writer, poet and
scriptwriter. Her novella and two novels are brilliant and distinctive, playing
games with language, overturning the ordinary, juxtaposing voices. Always inclined
to the poetic, Kennedy turned to poetry in 2003, with the highly acclaimed book-length
sequence, Sing-song.
Selected published works
100 Traditional Smiles, 1988; Musica Ficta, 1993;
A Boy and His Uncle, 1998; Sing-song, 2003, Montana New Zealand
Book Award for Poetry 2004; The Time of the Giants, 2005.
Publishers
Auckland University Press www.auckland.ac.nz/aup
Biography
Anne Kennedy was born in 1959. Her fiction, including the novels Musica
Ficta and A Boy and His Uncle, has been published internationally.
She won the 1985 Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award.
Long-known for the poetic qualities of her fiction, she at last turned her
hand to poetry proper and produced the sequence Sing-song in 2003.
Sing-song was named Poetry Book of the Year at the 2004 Montana New
Zealand Book Awards.
Kennedy weaves many influences into her writing, including music, art, film
and her Catholic upbringing. Her fertile, inventive imagination and her wry,
satirical humour give her writing a startling freshness. Her fiction tends to
be fragmentary and dislocated, in turns teasing and appeasing the reader, but
full of charm and ultimately reaching a satisfying coherence and completeness.
