This year’s Wintec poetry competition will be judged by John Newton who is a poet, cultural historian and occasional musician. 

 

He is the 2014 Writer in Residence at the University of Waikato.  Otherwise he lives on Waiheke Island.

 

Dr Newton knew as young as 13 or 14 that he wanted to be a poet and says he was lucky his English teachers encouraged him to pursue it. “I wrote my first book of poems as an undergraduate at the University of Canterbury, but it was another 25 years before I wrote another.”

 

He is the author of The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem Commune (VUP, 2009), and three books of poetry: Tales from the Angler’s Eldorado (Untold, 1985), Lives of the Poets (VUP, 2010) and Family Songbook (VUP, 2013).  

 

Dr Newton is working on two books while based at Waikato University. One is a book of poems, the other he says will be a fresh take on New Zealand writing in the mid-20th century.

 

“I’ve already done some preliminary work on the history project,” says Dr Newton. “I’m conscious that the history of New Zealand writing has fallen into eclipse. I’ll be exploring the impact of the Second World War on New Zealand literature in a way I hope non-specialist readers will enjoy reading. We still have a lot to learn from our own ‘classic’ literature.”

 

The new book of poems he is writing has the working title Road Sign with Bullet Holes. It’s a suite of four “or perhaps five” long poems exploring the unofficial history of romanticism.

 

John has recorded a country album with his band The Tenderizers (Love Me Tender, 2011), and performs music and spoken-word material with fellow poet Cliff Fell, known collectively as The Adulterators. (Look out for them in Hamilton in October.)