Jane Arthur
Jane Arthur is a poet, children's writer and editor. She was born in New Plymouth, and lives in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, where she manages and co-owns (with bestselling novelist Catherine Robertson) GOOD BOOKS, a small independent bookshop.
Jane has a Master of Arts (Distinction) in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, a Diploma in Publishing from Whitireia Polytechnic, and a Master of Arts (Honours) in English Literature from the University of Auckland. She won the 2018 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize, judged by US poet Eileen Myles. In 2020, she was awarded an Emerging Writers Residency from the Michael King Writers Centre, and was a "40 Under 40" inspiring alumni of the University of Auckland.
Jane is a founding editor of children's literature website The Sapling, was on the judging panel for the 2019 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, and was the convenor of the judging panel for the 2020 awards. Jane was on the judging panel of the poetry category for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Her first poetry collection, Craven, was published in September 2019 by Victoria University Press. It was selected as one of the Top 10 Best New Zealand Poetry Collections of 2019 by The Spinoff and was on the longlist for the 2020 Ockham NZ Book Awards, where it won the 2020 Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry (Best First Book Award).
A second collection, Calamities!, will be published in May 2023 by Te Herenga Waka University Press (formerly Victoria University Press), and a children's novel is forthcoming in 2024 with Puffin/Penguin Random House NZ.
Genre:
- Children's Fiction
- Poetry
- Review Writing
Skills:
- Editing
- Poetry Readings
- Print Media Writing (magazines/newspapers)
- Proofreading
- Reviews
Branch:
Wellington
Location:
Publications:
Craven (2019)
‘She seems to me a poet of scale and embodiment. Her moments are informed by awe and intelligence – quick and seamless. They don’t have to try so hard. I felt novels and films in these poems. I thought: this is a poet of capacity.’ — Eileen Myles
Craven is an exceptional debut: Jane Arthur delights, unnerves and challenges in poems that circle both the everyday and the ineffable – piano practice, past lives, being forced onto dancefloors. This is a smart and disarming collection that traces the ever-changing forms of light and dark in our lives, and how our eyes adjust, despite ourselves, as we go along.
Winner of the 2020 Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry (MitoQ Best First Book Award), Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Published by Victoria University Press. https://vup.victoria.ac.nz/craven/
Calamities! (2023)
In her second, spine-cracking collection, Jane Arthur wants ‘to get morbid’. Moving with ease between the cerebral and the ethereal she measures her anxieties against a cosmic canvas – taking in everything from meteorites and distant planets to pomanders and cat’s ears. Whether contemplating time, regret, or the end of the world, these poems don’t flinch. But in writing against hope, Arthur also writes against hopelessness, and finds, at the heart of it all, a bear, sleeping soundly – or perhaps dead.
'Calamities! is a compelling book of the unsettled and unsettling, set in a world where comfort is an endangered animal and the apocalypse lurks outside our front doors. Jane Arthur’s perceptive and all-too-relatable poems are what we need in these uncertain times – they make me an even bigger fan of her already astonishing body of work.'
— Chris Tse
Published by Te Herenga Waka University Press