Profile Selected published works
Biography From 1966 his poems began appearing in periodicals. After graduating from the University of Auckland in 1968 with an MA in English, he travelled extensively overseas. He returned to New Zealand as the Burns Fellow in 1972 and since then has published 12 books of poetry. In 1985 he co-edited The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. His introduction argued that language itself is a component of geocultural location and that poetry is grounded there as well as within markers of place and history. Wedde has also written fiction. His first novel, Dick Seddon’s Great Dive, won the 1977 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. Symmes Hole (1986) is a novel of epic scope, sustaining a prolonged parallel between the nineteenth-century plot which involves James ‘Worser’ Heberley, an early whaler, and a contemporary plot-line concerning a researcher who is investigating aspects of the whaling industry. Survival Arts, a comic novel, was published by both Penguin NZ and Faber UK in 1988. The Viewing Platform: A Novel (2006) is a sharply satiric work that looks at themes of home, hope, culture-making and identity from the perspective of the central characters personal experience and through the campaigns and slogans devised by the tourism industry. Between 1983 and 1990 Wedde was art critic for The Evening Post newspaper in Wellington. A sampling of his critical writings is How to Be Nowhere: Essays and Texts, 1971–1994 (1995). Other grants since the Burns include the Writers’ Bursary 1974, the Scholarship in Letters 1980, 1989, and the Victoria University writing fellowship 1984. He was a member of the Literary Fund Advisory Committee 1977–79, and of the Queen Elizabeth II Visual Arts Panel in 1990. From 1994 to 2004 Wedde worked as a member of the conceptual team charged with developing the Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa's radical agenda. Making Ends Meet: Essays & Talks 1992-2004 (2005), provides a commentary on the cultural issues of that project and those years. Wedde was the 2005 Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow and the following year the Arts Foundation of New Zealand made him a Laureate. In 2007, he received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Auckland. These annual awards honour alumni who have made outstanding contributions to their professions, to their communities, and to the nation.
Photograph: Joanna Forsberg |
