The Grass Catcher

The Grass Catcher

A digression about home

Ian Wedde

Publication      September 2014

ISBN               9780864739384

Hardback - rrp  $40

Victoria University Press

From early childhood in post-war Blenheim to the remote regions of Bangladesh, from an English boarding school to 1960s Auckland, from Jordan during the civil war of 1969-70 to family homes full of children, this dazzling book traces the many shifts in Ian Wedde’s life. Haunted by the ghosts of his restless German and Scottish great grandparents, and of his wandering parents, Wedde is always looking over his shoulder as he writes. His companion throughout is his twin brother Dave, who shared their first home – their mother Linda’s womb – and who, as the book ends, hosts a lunch where the brothers raise their glasses to the transit lounges of their lives. Affectionate, funny, sad, analytical, but above all honest, The Grass Catcher is at once a moving personal memoir and an engaging and reflective essay on the nature of memory.

210 x 138mm

288 pages

b/w illustrations

About the author:

Ian Wedde was born in 1946. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, six novels, most recently The Catastrophe (VUP, 2011). Wedde is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships and grants. 

Among the most recent are the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship at Menton in France (2005), a Fulbright New Zealand Travel Award to the USA (2006), an Arts Foundation Laureate Award (2006), a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Auckland (2007), an ONZM (2010), and the Landfall Essay Prize (2010). In 2011-13 Wedde was New Zealand’s Poet Laureate and the 2014 Creative NZ Writer in Residence in Berlin. He lives and works in Auckland.