Hawken, Dinah

Dinah Hawken (b. 1943)

Contents

Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive (2004):

CD16

1. The Harbour Poems [1]
2. Elegance
3. Lyric
4. Let me Put in a Word for Trees
5. Hope
6. Light is the Word for Light
7. Everywhere, Everyday
8. The Sound of Places and Names [1-3]

Bio / Bibliography:

Dinah Hawken was born in Hawera in 1943, and educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Island Bay, Wellington. After training as a physiotherapist and social worker, she worked for Catholic Social Services in Wellington before leaving for the United States in the early 1970s, where she earned a degree in social psychology from the State University of New York. After returning to New Zealand, she attended Bill Manhire’s creative writing course at Victoria University before once more leaving to attend college in New York - this time, Brooklyn College, from which she graduated M.F.A. in creative writing. Upon returning to New Zealand, she worked for a number of years as a counsellor at Student Counselling Services, Victoria University.

Her first book of poems, It Has No Sound and Is Blue, won the Commonwealth Best First Book of Poetry Prize for 1987. Since then, she has published five further collections of poetry and short fiction, and has been regularly featured in Sport, Landfall, Vital Writing, Meanjin, and JAAM, among other publications. She currently coordinates a paper, ‘Writing the Landscape’, at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University.

Biblio:

It Has No Sound and Is Blue, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1987
Small Stories of Devotion, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1991
Water Leaves Stones, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1995
The Little Book of Bitching, Wellington: Very Cross Books in association with Sport, 1998
Where we say we are: letters, postcards, poems (with Marianne Ackerman et al.), Wellington: Whitireia Publishing, 2000
Oh There You Are Tui!, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2001