Dominic O’Sullivan, announced on social media his father had died in Dunedin on Sunday April 28. “Hei aitua hoki, kua hinga toku matua. I am profoundly sad to share that my father, Emeritus Professor Sir Vincent O’Sullivan, died in Dunedin late yesterday. I was present with his wife Helen. In the next day or two, Vince will travel to the Home of Compassion in Island Bay, where he will repose ahead of his Requiem Mass later in the week at St Mary of the Angels, Wellington.”

Vincent was a poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, critic, editor, biographer, and librettist; he lectured in English and was a professor of English literature at Victoria University of Wellington.  Fergus Barrowman, publisher at Te Herenga Waka University Press, posted on social media he was “not ready” for Sir Vincent’s death. “He’ll be one of our greatest writers, and I think that the popular regard and the critical regard is only going to grow as people read and read more deeply and start connecting the dots between the disparate parts of his ire,” Barrowman told Morning Report on Monday.

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In 1966, O’Sullivan won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry, in 1979 he received the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award for a short story, and in 1994 he received the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship. He won the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 1999.

O’Sullivan’s investiture as a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit by the governor-general, Dame Cindy Kiro, at Government House, Wellington, on 2 May 2022

In the 2000 Queen’s Birthday Honours, O’Sullivan was appointed a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature. In 2009, following the restoration of titular honours by the New Zealand government, he initially declined redesignation as a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, because, in his view, it did not fit New Zealand “historically and socially”, and that “it didn’t seem to make much sense in contemporary New Zealand society”. However, he accepted the change in December 2021.

O’Sullivan was awarded the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer’s Fellowship in 2004, the 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, and the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2006. He was the New Zealand Poet Laureate for the term 2013 to 2015, and in 2016 he was the Honoured New Zealand Writer at the Auckland Writers Festival.

O’Sullivan received the general non-fiction award at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for The Dark is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere a Biographical Portrait.