Bernadette Hall

Profile
Bernadette Hall is one of the most distinctive poetic voices to have emerged in New Zealand in recent years. Her abiding themes of secular and religious love, and the transporting passion of writing are strongly present in her work and are extended by a deepening political engagement with the history and possibilities of this land.

Selected published works
The Persistant Levitator, 1994; Still Talking, 1997; Settler Dreaming, 2001; The Merino Princess: Selected Poems, 2004; The Ponies, 2007.

Publishers
Victoria University Press www.vuw.ac.nz/vup

Biography
Bernadette Hall was born in Central Otago in 1945 and studied classics at the University of Otago, Dunedin.

She has published five well-regarded collections of poetry, including The Persistent Levitator, which was shortlisted for the 1995 New Zealand Book Awards. Her most recent collection, Settler Dreaming, was one of three collections shortlisted in the 2003 Tasmania Pacific Region Poetry Prize along with books by notable Australian poets Les Murray and John Tranter.

Hall’s work has been anthologised in many collections and journals, both in New Zealand and abroad, and for ten years she was poetry editor of Takahe. She has also written two plays and a musical.

One of her poems, The Lay Sister, was selected for the online collection Best New Zealand Poems 2001. In 1996, Bernadette Hall was the Burns Fellow at the University of Otago and in 2004, she was awarded an Antarctic Arts Fellow. She was the 2006 writer-in-residence at Victoria University of Wellington. In July 2007, Hall will take up the Rathcoola Redidency in Cork, Ireland.