C.K. (Karl) Stead is the only New Zealand writer to have been both our Poet Laureate and won the Prime Minister’s Award for fiction. He has also won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize, the Sunday Times/EFG Private Bank Award (the world’s largest for the short story), the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize, and others. He is known internationally as a novelist but also as a literary critic, and a specialist in 20th century poetic modernism. He is Professor Emeritus of the University of Auckland, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and recipient of our highest public honour, the ONZ.

---