Robert Sullivan

Profile
Robert Sullivan’s first book Jazz Waiata won the PEN Award for Best First Book of Poetry at the 1991 New Zealand Book Awards and introduced us to an exciting young poet who, even then, showed a distinctive talent, a refreshing lack of piety and a good deal of soul.

Selected published works
Jazz Waiata, 1990, PEN Award for Best First Book of Poetry New Zealand Book Awards 1991; Piki Ake!, 1993; Star Waka, 1999; Captain Cook in the Underworld, 2002; Voice Carried My Family, 2005.

Publishers
Auckland University Press www.auckland.ac.nz/aup

Biography
Acclaimed poet Robert Sullivan was born in 1967 of Irish and Ngā Puhi descent. He has been writing poetry since 1986 and has published four collections, as well as a graphic novel Maui: Legends of the Outcast and an illustrated collection of Māori mythology for children, Weaving Earth and Sky (2002), which won the 2003 New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards.

Star Waka, a large, ambitious work of 100 poems in 2001 lines, is perhaps the most important poetry collection by a Māori writer since Hone Tuwhare’s No Ordinary Sun, and was shortlisted in the 2000 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

He co-edited, with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri, Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (Auckland University Press, 2003), which won the New Zealand Reference and Anthology Category at the 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

In 1998, Sullivan was the Literary Fellow at the University of Auckland and in 2001 he was the Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai’i Manoa. Along with his wife, poet Anne Kennedy, he moved to Hawai’i in 2003 and teaches creative writing at the University of Hawai’i. Sullivan is on the board of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre and co-edits the online literary journal Trout.