David Beach

Profile
David Beach has written two books of poetry. His first book Abandoned Novel, published in 2006, won the 2008 biennial Prize in Modern Letters worth NZ$65,000. New Zealand's largest literary award is sponsored by United States businessman and arts philanthropist Glenn Schaeffer and is administered by Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters.

Selected published works
Abandoned Novel, 2006; The End of Atlantic City, 2008.

Publisher
Victoria University Press
www.victoria.ac.nz/aup

Biography
David Beach was born in England in 1959 to New Zealand parents. He was five when the family returned to New Zealand. He grew up mainly in Wellington, attending Onslow College and then Victoria University where he gained a BA in English Literature with First Class Honours in 1983. In 1986 he moved to Sydney and worked as a mail sorter. He began writing poems in Australia. They have been published in newspapers and magazines, including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Bulletin, The Canberra Times, Southerly, Quadrant, Overland and Island.

In 2002 he came back to Wellington where he worked as a mail sorter for New Zealand Post.

His poem Parachute was chosen as one of the Best New Zealand Poems 2003.

Abandoned Novel, his award-winning book, was described by one reviewer as “satirical, self-reflexive and sardonic”. It bought a new and unusual voice to New Zealand poetry — albeit at times the voice of God. The 59 decasyllabic formal sonnets are bracingly anti-poetic and the subject material is diverse; ideas of literary immortality, a ceremony in a cemetery, a comparison of Saint George to George W. Bush, and The Crusades.

“Nearly every one of Beach’s poems are brought to life by the statement they make – they have senses of humour, conscience, anger, fear and politics and are unflinching in the expression of their ideas about war, celebrity, religion, death and writing” — Amy Brown.

The End of Atlantic City features prominently two urban locations not often juxtaposed, Troy and Te Aro. A chapter-by-chapter sonnet translation of The Iliad, and a sequence set in the Wellington inner city suburb, play off each other in a work where the line between the real and the imagined becomes as blurred as the poetry/prose divide.

Beach’s poem Te Aro 12 has been selected for Best New Zealand Poems 2008.