Megan Kitching

Megan Kitching is a poet and author of At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023). Born in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland, she now lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Queen Mary University, London, looking at the influence of the natural sciences on eighteenth-century poetry. She has taught English and creative writing in the UK and at the University of Otago. Her poetry has appeared in The Frogmore Papers (UK), takahē, Tarot, Poetry New Zealand, and Landfall. “The horses,” first published in takahē 95, was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident.


Genre:

  • Poetry

Skills:

  • Editing
  • Proofreading
  • Tutoring
  • Workshops (adults)

Branch:

Otago/Southland

Location:

Dunedin

Publications:


At the Point of Seeing

At the Point of Seeing is the extraordinary debut collection from Ōtepoti Dunedin poet Megan Kitching. Poised, richly observant and deftly turned, Kitching’s poems bestow a unique attention upon the world. Her eye is finely attuned to the well-trodden yet overlooked – the places between ‘dirt and thumb’ or ‘together and alone’ – and especially the weedy, overgrown and pest-infested places where the human impulses to name, control and colonise meet nature’s life force and wild exuberance. These compelling poems urge the reader to slow down and give space to the living, moving, breathing environment that surrounds them.