Robert Sullivan

Robert Sullivan is a poet whose nine books include the bestselling Star Waka (Auckland UP, 1999), which has been reprinted five times, translated into German (Mana Verlag), and  short-listed for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards (2000). His graphic novel Maui: Legends of the Outcast, illustrated by Chris Slane, was shortlisted for the LIANZA Russell Clark Medal. Weaving Earth and Sky, illustrated by Gavin Bishop, and listed as a Storylines Notable Non-Fiction Book (2003), won the Non-Fiction category and the New Zealand Post Children’s Book of the Year (2003).  Captain Cook in the Underworld was longlisted in the Poetry Category for theMontana New Zealand Book Awards (2003). It is also an oratorio for the composition by John Psathas, Orpheus in Rarohenga, performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the Orpheus Choir of Wellington. Robert’s poem ‘Kawe Reo / Voices Carry’ is installed in bronze in front of the Auckland City Library. His first collection, Jazz Waiata, won the PEN (NZ) Best First Book Award in 1991. His poetry appears in numerous major magazines and journals in New Zealand, the UK, Australia and America. Robert has participated in many national and international festivals, including the Frankfurt Book Fair, and Taipei International Book Exhibition. He belongs to Ngapuhi Nui Tonu, and Kai Tahu iwi, with affiliations to Ngati Raukawa, and Ngai Tai. He is also of Irish descent.

Genre:

  • Poetry

Skills:

  • Competition Judging
  • Workshops (adults)

Branch:

Otago/Southland

Location:

Publications:

Shout Ha! to the Sky

Shout Ha! to the Sky explores history and contemporary life from a Maori person’s perspective, and seeks to restore possibilities removed through the forces of colonialism. The poetry is intimate, wry, funny, angry and always loving. It weaves into and dialogues with multi-genre work by a range of Pacific authors such as Anne Salmond, Albert Wendt, Haunani-Kay Trask, Witi Ihimaera, and the late Hone Tuwhare, as well as writing from outside the Pacific by Anna Seward, W.B.Yeats, Ezra Pound, Keats, Vijay Seshadri, Dante Alighieri.

Star Waka

"In his 1999 poetic sequence Star Waka, Robert Sullivan uses the image of the waka as a container for the freight of history—personal, familial, tribal, national. The waka, he says, ‘is a knife through time’, connecting the pre-contact past with the urban present and sailing on towards a possible, if fancifully configured, extraterrestrial future. The waka morphs as it travels, from primeval first fleet to space ship." - The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature. Published on the cusp of the new millennium, Sullivan’s third book of poems, Star Waka, came with some strings attached: each poem had to feature either a star, a waka, or the ocean. Within these parameters, and in 2001 lines, Sullivan creates 100 poems that, he says, themselves function like a waka: ‘member of the crew change, the rhythm and the view changes – it is subject to the laws of nature’.

Tūnui | Comet

Tūnui | Comet is the first collection in more than a decade by one of our most important living Māori poets. Rolling easily between kōrero Māori and the canonical traditions of English-language poetry, through karakia and pōwhiri, treaty training and decolonisation wiki entries, Robert Sullivan takes readers on a marvellous poetic hīkoi.

 

Source: Auckland University Press.