Jeffrey Paparoa Holman (left) - poet,
fiction/non-fiction writer and lecturer, will judge the Kathleen Grattan Award
for Poetry 2013, New Zealand’s premier poetry prize.
The winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award
receives $16,000, making it the richest poetry prize in New Zealand; the
winning manuscript is considered for publication by Otago University Press and
the winner also receives a year’s subscription to Landfall.
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, reflecting on the
role of judge, said:
‘I got to visit the great American poet
Jack Gilbert last year, in a rest home in Berkeley, three days before he died.
Jack had Alzheimer’s – he was there but not there. I read him two of his poems,
one of mine and held his hand.
‘In a 2005 Paris Review interview, he said that what mattered to him was
“paying attention to being alive”. Jack, in his poetry, certainly did. “When I read the poems that matter to me,” he
said, “it stuns me how much the presence of the heart – in all its forms – is
endlessly available there.”
‘The endlessly available human heart – that’s
what I’ll be hoping to find.’
Holman has written several collections of
poetry: As Big as a Father (2002),
was long-listed for the Poetry Category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards
2003. The title poem ‘As Big as a Father’ also won the 1997 Whitirea Prize; CUP
published his most recent collection, Shaken
Down 6.3, in 2004. In 2012 he was awarded the Creative New Zealand
University of Iowa Residency. The Lost
Pilot: A Memoir is due to be published by Penguin Books NZ in May 2013.
The Kathleen Grattan Award is for an
original collection of poems or a long poem by a New Zealand or Pacific
resident or citizen. Entries are accepted from 1st May; the closing date is 31st
July.
The winner will be announced in the November issue of Landfall. Conditions of entry are
available on the Otago University Press website: http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/landfall/grattanaward.html
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