Profile
Brian Turner’s poetry is grounded in the Otago region but it nevertheless
moves constantly beyond the local or descriptive. Avoiding poetic cliques and
fashions as rigorously as he rejects the archaic conventions of nature poetry,
he produces work of luminous exactness.
Selected published works
Ladders of Rain, 1978, Commonwealth Poetry Prize; Beyond,
1992, New Zealand Poetry Award 1993; Taking Off, 2001;
Somebodies and Nobodies, 2002; Footfall 2005.
Publishers
Victoria University Press www.vuw.ac.nz/vup
Random House New Zealand Ltd www.randomhouse.co.nz
Biography
Brian Turner was born in Dunedin in 1944. He is a poet and a freelance
journalist, editor and writer. His first book of poems, Ladders of Rain,
won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. This was followed by a number of highly acclaimed
poetry collections and award-winning writing in a wide range of genres, including
journalism, biography (of New Zealand rugby union legends Josh Kronfeld and
Colin Meads), memoir (Somebodies and Nobodies) and sports writing.
In 1984 he was Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago and in 1997 he
was writer-in-residence at the University of Canterbury. His poetry collection,
Taking Off, was published in 2001 and was a finalist in the 2002 Montana
New Zealand Book Awards and his book Footfall was a finalist in the 2006 Montana
New Zealand Book Awards.
Several of Brian Turner's poems have appeared on the online collections of
Best New Zealand Poems. Brian Turner was named the Te Mata Estate
New Zealand Poet Laureate in 2003.
