Plumb, Vivienne

[Photograph: Willie Plumb]

Vivienne Plumb (b. 1955)

Contents:

Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance (2007):

A Letter from My Daughter
The Vegan Bar and Gaming Lounge
The Tank

Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive (2004):

CD29

1. A Letter from my Daughter
2. The Vegan Bar and Gaming Lounge
3. The Tank
4. Far Too Grand
5. Lychees
6. The Brown Cow
7. The Dog Memorial
8. The Billionaire
9. Back to Scheveningen

Bio /Bibliography:

Vivienne began writing after attending Bill Manhire’s Creative Writing Course at Victoria University, Wellington. Her short fiction collection, The Wife Who Spoke Japanese In Her Sleep, was published by University of Otago Press and was awarded the 1994 Hubert Church Prose Award (Best First Book Award).

Her first playscript, Love Knots, was awarded the 1993 Bruce Mason Playwrighting Award. It premiered at Circa Theatre. Love Knots was published in 1994 and has also been adapted for broadcast on National Radio. Several excerpts have been published in anthologies in the U.S.A. (Smith and Kraus, Heinemann).

She has served as vice-president and president of the N.Z. Poetry Society and is a founding member of The Women’s Play Press publishing collective. She has edited two collections of new N.Z. prose and poetry and is editing a new collection of short theatre monologues, Red Light Means Stop, published by The Women’s Play Press in 2003.

Her first collection of poetry, Salamanca, was published in 1998 by HeadworX, and her second, Avalanche, was published by Pemmican Press in June, 2000. Her poem, "The Tank", won first prize in the 1998 N.Z. Poetry Society’s International Poetry Competition, and during 2000 another poem, "The Vegan Bar and Gaming Lounge", won second place in the Listener National Poetry Day Competition.She has been funded to work on a third collection.

She has read in the past at many literary events, such as National Poetry Day and for Subverse: 1999 Queensland Poetry Festival, and has read frequently as an invited guest to poetry groups and book lanches.

She was a guest reader at the 2001 Poetry on the Vine (Wairarapa) and during her time as the 2001 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow she read many times in Auckland including for the Auckland Literary Society, and at The Women’s Bookshop and Borders Bookshop. She was a guest reader at the 2002 N.Z. Post Writers and Readers Week, part of the N.Z. Festival of the Arts and at the 9th World Poetry Reading in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (Oct. 1 – 6, 2002).

During 2000 she was invited to perform her ‘live-art lecture’, Fact or Fiction: Meditations on Mary Finger, at the 5th International Women Playwrights Conference in Athens, Greece.

In 2001 Vivienne held the 2001 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship which she used to complete her first novel, Secret City.

Recently she has had short fiction published in the U.S.A. in Literature Without Borders (Prentice-Hall), for study in colleges in U.S.A.

Her novel, Secret City, was published in 2003 by Cape Catley Press (Auckland).

She has a B.A. in English Literature and Art History from Victoria University, Wellington, and completed her M.A. there in 2000.