Winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry 2010
Between August and early September last year, judge Vincent O’Sullivan read his way through a great stack of poetry manuscripts, all submitted for the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry. Established in memory of an Auckland writer and editor in 2008, the award is for the best unpublished collection of poetry by a New Zealand writer. Its winner receives $16,000 (making it one of Australasia’s richest poetry prizes), and publication by Otago University Press.
Last year’s winner was Jennifer Compton and her book, ‘This City’, will be launched in Wellington and Palmerston North in time for National Poetry Day. Born in New Zealand, resident in Australia, with literary achievements in both countries, Compton is a truly trans-Tasman writer. Two recent residencies in New Zealand, at Wellington’s Randell Cottage in 2008 and as Visiting Literary Artist at Massey University in 2010, have enabled her to examine her roots and reflect on life, as these opening lines indicate:
I am travelling away from my life, towards my life.
This city knows all my secrets.
And that tram, lit from within, waiting at the end of the line.
This city, which is nowhere else.
Two previous residencies in Italy produced another kind of reflection on time and place.
As a result, ‘This City’ circles the globe, from Florence to Palmerston North. Topography, public space and Compton’s evocation of the transient grounded in these spaces – snippets overheard on an Italian strada, scenes on a bus in Moxham Ave, imaginings of lives already lived – leave a taut and exciting impression of people here, in this place, in ‘This City’. As the Grattan Award judge Vincent O’Sullivan commented about this collection:
‘It is a volume that sustains a questing, warmly sceptical mind’s engagement with wherever it is, whatever it takes in, and carries the constant drive to say it right. This is a complete book of poetry, coherent, gathering its parts to arrive at a cast of mind, a distinctive voice, far more than simply adding one good poem to another.’
Jennifer Compton was born in Wellington in 1949. Between the early 1970s and ’80s she worked as a playwright in both Australia and New Zealand, with productions on radio and in theatre in both countries.
She has written and had produced or published many stage and radio plays and short stories and essays. Her stage play, The Big Picture, which premiered at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney in 1997, was published by Currency Press and also produced in Wellington by Circa and Perth by the Perth Theatre Company. She has won several Australian awards for poetry and has been an invited writer at literary festivals in Australia and internationally.
Itinerary:
MONDAY 18 JULY
Writers on Mondays, Best NZ Poems 10
Te Papa, Marae 4th floor, 12.15 pm–1.15 pm
One of 10 poets in this reading
Poetry @ Thistle Inn
Thistle Inn, 3 Mulgrave Street Wellington
6 pm launch of This City in association with NZ Poetry Society
Mary McCallum to launch, Millwood Gallery selling books
TUESDAY 19 JULY
Book launch
Bruce McKenzie Booksellers, 37 George St
Johanna Aitchison to launch
FRIDAY 22 JULY
Poetry Central, 2011
Central City Library, Level 2, Lorne Street
5.30–7.00 pm, opening National Poetry Day event
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