Bill Manhire

Profile
Bill Manhire is one of New Zealand’s foremost poets. He is a hugely talented writer who has achieved critical and popular success in New Zealand and abroad. He is also a gifted teacher of creative writing and an outspoken advocate for poetry.

Selected published works
Doubtful Sounds: Essays and Interviews, 2000; Collected Poems, 2001; Under the Influence, 2003; The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine Antarctica, 2004; Lifted, 2005.

Biography
Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill in 1946 and educated at the Universities of Otago and London. He has published many books of poetry (four times winning the New Zealand Book Awards) and also a number of volumes of fiction. He has edited several best-selling anthologies of New Zealand poetry and short stories, and a collection of his essays and interviews called Doubtful Sounds was published in 2000. His regular column on Radio New Zealand had a wide following and did much to raise interest in poetry throughout the country.

His Collected Poems 1967-1999 was published in New Zealand in 2001 and by Carcanet (www.carcanet.co.uk) in the UK. A memoir, published in the Montana Estates Essay Series and called Under the Influence (Four Winds Press), is about growing up in the Otago and Southland pubs run by his family.

In 1997, he was made New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate, in a scheme sponsored by Te Mata Estate, and the collection of poetry, What To Call Your Child, was published to celebrate his tenure. At the heart of the book is a sequence of poems which arose from Manhire’s visit to Antarctica in 1998.

Bill Manhire was awarded the 2004 Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, New Zealand’s most prestigious literary fellowship. He was, along with Billy Collins and Phyllis Webb, a judge of the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize. He now heads the International Institute of Modern Letters (www.vuw.ac.nz/modernletters) at Victoria University of Wellington and directs its prestigious creative writing programme. Graduates of the course include many of New Zealand’s most accomplished contemporary writers. In 2007, Manhire was awarded the Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement in recognition of his significant contribution to New Zealand literature.