Bill Manhire
Professor, School of English, Film and Theatre
Victoria University of Wellington

This speaker's paper is available here.

Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill in 1946, and educated at the Universities of Otago and London. He is now Professor of English at Victoria University, where he directs the prestigious creative writing workshop whose graduates include many of New Zealand's most accomplished contemporary writers (among them Elizabeth Knox, Barbara Anderson, Anthony McCarten, Kapka Kassabova, Barbara Else, and Emily Perkins).

In 1997, he was made New Zealand's inaugural Poet Laureate, in a scheme sponsored by Te Mata Estate, and his laureate collection, What to Call Your Child, is published in the week before this year's PSSM conference. At the heart of the book is a sequence of Antarctic poems which arise from Manhire's visit to Antarctica in January 1998 under the new 'Artists to Antarctica' programme. He spent two weeks on the ice, and 45 semi-heroic minutes at the South Pole.

He has published many books of poems (four times winning the New Zealand Book Award), and also a number of volumes of fiction. These include the choose-your-own-adventure story, The Brain of Katherine Mansfield, which is now available on the web. Bill Manhire has also edited a number of best-selling anthologies of New Zealand poetry (100 New Zealand Poems) and short fiction (Some Other Country and Six by Six).

Most recently he has been teaching New Zealand literature in the USA as Fulbright Visiting Professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC. As well as his new book of poems, a book of essays and interviews (Doubtful Sounds) will be published later this year.