Dr Sue Wootton has been named the new publisher for Otago University Press and will officially take up the role in April.

Wootton is an editor and author who co-publishes the medical humanities site Corpus: Conversations about Medicine and Life. She is an award-winning writer of poetry and prose, whose work has been widely published and anthologised. Her novel Strip was longlisted for the 2017 Ockham NZ Book Awards, and her most recent poetry collection, The Yield (OUP), was a finalist in 2018. She was the 2008 Robert Burns Fellow, held the 2018/19 NZSA Beatson Fellowship, and was awarded the 2020 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship.

Wootton has wide-reaching cross-disciplinary interests, and has recently been awarded her PhD from the University of Otago for a thesis that explores language and the imagination as essential forms of human movement.

‘I am absolutely delighted to be joining the talented and hard-working OUP team as publisher,’ she says.

‘It’s an honour to take the baton from Rachel Scott, and I’m looking forward to continuing to grow the impressive list of excellent books in the OUP catalogue.’

Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Enterprise Professor Richard Blaikie is thrilled with the appointment of Sue Wootton, who brings her own deep literary and publishing experience to the role, he says.

‘Through Sue’s leadership OU Press will maintain momentum as a leading publisher of books of high scholarly and cultural significance, and will grow to further serve the needs of Aotearoa and the Pacific in the years ahead.’

‘We also acknowledge the immense effort of the outgoing publisher, Rachel Scott, who has worked tirelessly over eight years to maintain the quality and relevance of OU Press as a contemporary New Zealand publishing house. We wish her a long and enjoyable retirement.’