Kevin Ireland

Profile
Kevin Ireland, poet, short story writer, novelist and librettist, is one of New Zealand’s best-loved writers. His poetry is known especially for his spare and witty style, his resolute minimalism, his regular use of imagery and extended metaphors, his carefully patterned forms and recurring themes of love.

Selected published works
Literary Cartoons, 1977; New Zealand Book Award for Poetry 1977; Anzac Day: Selected Poems, 1997; Fourteen Reasons for Writing, 2001; Walking the Land, 2003; Getting Away With It, 2004; Airports and Other Wasted Days, 2007; How to Survive the Morning, 2008.

Kevin Ireland's non-fiction can be found here.

Publishers
Hazard Press www.hazardpress.com
Random House New Zealand www.randomhouse.co.nz

Biography
Kevin Ireland was born in Auckland in 1933. He spent twenty-five years in England before returning to New Zealand in the early 1980s.

He was winner of the 1977 New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, was writer-in-residence at Canterbury University in 1986, the Sargeson Fellow in 1987, the University of Auckland’s Literary Fellow in 1989, assistant editor of the influential literary journal, Quote Unquote, and, in 1990–91, president of PEN (New Zealand Centre). In 1990 he received an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for Services to Literature.

Ireland has also published a collection of short stories, Sleeping with the Angels (1995), and four novels. The first volume of his memoir, Under the Bridge and Over the Moon, won the History and Biography category of the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and in 2000 he was made an Honorary Doctor of Literature by Massey University. Ireland received the 2004 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Poetry.