Jeffrey Paparoa Holman to judge the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry 2013

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 31^st 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