Bill Manhire Author & Editor

Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill in 1946. He was his country's inaugural Poet Laureate and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry four times. He has published many books of poetry and several works of fiction, including the short story collection South Pacific (Carcanet, 1994). Manhire holds a chair at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he is founding director of its Institute of Modern Letters. In 2005 he was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit and named an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate. In 2007 he received the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry.