New Zealand: The Written World
Activities in this resource are aimed at pupils in lower secondary school (S1–S3).
Curriculum for Excellence Correspondences (Levels 3–4)
Literacy and English experiences and outcomes.
Angus Calder
Angus Calder was a journalist, historian, editor and critic – and in later years, a poet.
Gerrie Fellows
Gerrie Fellows was born in New Zealand but has lived and worked in Scotland for thirty years, as a creative writing tutor, writer-in-residence and most recently as a mentor to new poets through the Clydebuilt Mentoring programme.
Elizabeth Fleming
Elizabeth Fleming was a poet, playwright, and short story writer, best known for her stories and plays for children.
Jean Guthrie-Smith
Jean Guthrie-Smith expressed her strong sense of social justice through many of the poems in her 1922 collection, and painted contrasting portraits of Glasgow and London in the first decades of the 20th century.
Bernadette Hall
Bernadette Hall was born in Central Otago and lives in a tiny beach settlement 45 km north of Christchurch, in the South Island of New Zealand. An award-winning poet and playwright who for many years taught Classics, Hall published her first collection, Heartwood, in 1989.
Brent Hodgson
Brent Hodgson was born in New Zealand and settled in Ayrshire, where he developed an eccentric form of Scots in which he wrote some of his poetry.
Kapka Kassabova
Kapka Kassabova is a Bulgarian-born poet and writer now living in Scotland.
Bill Manhire
Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill, New Zealand. His mother was an Edinburgh high school teacher who married a New Zealand sailor during the Second World War, and so one day found herself a publican's wife in New Zealand's far south. Manhire grew up in small pubs in Otago and Southland, and was educated at the Universities of Otago and London, where he did postgraduate research in Old Norse. He was the founding director of the 30-year-old creative writing programme at the International Institute of Modern Letters (Victoria University of Wellington), and New Zealand's inaugural poet laureate. His books include Doubtful Sounds – essays and interviews (VUP, 2000), a Collected Poems (VUP/Carcanet, 2001), Lifted (VUP, 2005) and The Victims of Lightning (VUP, 2010). He has also published volumes of short stories, and has edited anthologies of poetry and short fiction, including The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine Antarctica (VUP, 2004).
Rachel McCrum
Rachel McCrum is a poet, performer and promoter, now living in Canada.
Lyn Moir
Lyn Moir was born in Glasgow, studied and worked elsewhere in Britain and abroad, and returned to Scotland to settle in St Andrews in 2001. She has been a Hawthornden Fellow and has published four collections of poetry.
Gregory O'Brien
Gregory O'Brien, born in Matamata, is a Wellington-based poet, essayist, painter and art curator. He has edited numerous anthologies and art catalogues, and written extensively about New Zealand culture.