Profile
Elizabeth Smither is a leading New Zealand poet, admired and respected
for her distinctive, quirky, stylish lyrics with their unexpected twists and
their delight in ideas, objects and people. She has published fifteen collections,
and is also a short story writer and a novelist.
Selected published works
Here Come the Clouds, 1975; Shakespeare’s Virgins,
1983; A Pattern of Marching, 1989; New Zealand Book Award for Poetry
1990; The Tudor Style: Poems New and
Selected, 1993; The Lark Quartet,
1999, Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry 2000; The Year of Adverbs, 2007.
Elizabeth Smither's fiction can be found here.
Publishers
Auckland University Press www.auckland.ac.nz/aup
Penguin Books New Zealand www.penguin.co.nz
Biography
Elizabeth Smither was born in New Plymouth in 1941. Best known as a poet
and as New Zealand’s third Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate, she has also
written three novels, four books of short stories, a picture book for children
and a writer’s journal. However, poetry remains her greatest love and
the form she regards as the most demanding. Smither’s poetry has appeared
in many prestigious journals in Britain, Canada, Australia and more recently
the United States and Selected Poems has been published by British
poetry publisher Arc.
Smither published her first collection, Here Come the Clouds (1975),
when she was in her mid-thirties. The short poem is her forte: she has, according
to one commentator, “written some of the best short lyrics ever produced
in this country”. Smither’s poems are full of her own passions:
gardening, music, reading, travel, and especially friendships and her family.
Her tone is reflective, sometimes ironic or wistful, as she unravels an elegant
observation or a startling paradox.
Elizabeth Smither’s writing has received widespread recognition in many
awards and distinctions, which include a Literary Fund Writing Bursary (1977),
the Freda Buckland Award (1983), an Auckland University Literary Fellowship
(1984), two Scholarships in Letters (1987 and 1992), a Literary Fund Travelling
Bursary (1988), the Lilian Ida Smith Award (1989) and an Honorary D.Lit from
the University of Auckland (2004).
She was Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003.
