Stead, C. K.

[Photograph: Jan Kemp (2002)]

C. K. Stead (b. 1932)

Contents:

Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance (2006):

from April Notebook
Birthday Sonnet
from The Masks of Catullus
Between
Auckland
Horation

Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive (2004):

CD35

1. Crossing the Bar
2. This Time
3. from April Notebook [5]
4. Cold Moon
5. Birthday Sonnet [9]
6. from The Masks of Catullus [11, 16 & 19]
7. from Yes, T.S.
8. This May be Your Captain Speaking
9. Between
10. Lullaby
11. A Discursive Poem About Poetry and Thought
12. Treasure Island
13. Like
14. Auckland
15. The Right Thing
16. Les Enfants du Paradis
17. Hollywood
18. Horation
19. Gotland, Midsummer
20. Cat/ullus
21. On Turning Seventy
22. Catullus 65

New Zealand Poets Read Their Work (1974):

LP 2, side 1

Whether the Will is Free
Ode

LP 3, side 1

For a Children’s LP
Dissolution

Waiata Archive (1974):

CD 8

April Notebook – No. 8
April Notebook – No. 9
April Notebook – No. 10
April Notebook – No. 11
Whether the Will is Free
Ode: Martin McDermott
Pictures in a Gallery Undersea
For a Children’s LP
Dissolution

Bio /Bibliography:

C(hristian) K(arlson) Stead, b. Auckland, 1932, was one of the new poets of the 1950s and ‘60s, and earned an international reputation as a literary critic, particularly with the publication of The New Poetic, Yeats to Eliot, for several decades a standard text on literary Modernism in British universities. He was Professor of English at the University of Auckland for twenty years, established a creative writing course there in the 1980s, and took early retirement (aged 53) in 1986 to write full time. He has won the Jessie Mackay Award for poetry, the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award, the Landfall Readers’ Award (for the best poem in Landfall’s first 15 years of publication), the New Zealand Book Award for fiction (twice) and for poetry, the Katherine Mansfield Menton fellowship, the King’s Lynn Poetry Award, and a number of other literary awards, as well as Nuffield and Fulbright Travelling Fellowships. His novel Smith’s Dream became Roger Donaldson’s first movie, Sleeping Dogs (which was also Sam Neill’s first movie role). In recent years Stead has worked with Donaldson on the script of a movie of his novel Villa Vittoria. The Secret History of Modernism, published in the U.K. in 2001, re-released in 2003 as a Vintage pb, and described by the Irish Times as ‘brilliant… as subtle as Jane Austen and as fatalistic as Thomas Hardy’, was his ninth novel. The Spectator (U.K.) reviewer of his eighth novel, Talking about O’Dwyer, wrote ‘It seems incontestable that C.K.Stead is among the very best contemporary novelists’. Dog, 2002, is his twelfth collection of poems. He has published two collections of short stories, six books of literary criticism, and edited a number of other books including the Penguin Modern Classics selection of Katherine Mansfield’s letters and journals, and the Collected Stories of Maurice Duggan. His work is represented in all major New Zealand anthologies of poetry and short fiction of the past several decades. His novels are published simultaneously in New Zealand and the U.K. and have been variously translated into French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese and Croatian. He spends two or three months of each year away from New Zealand, most often in England and France. He was awarded the C.B.E. in 1985 for services to New Zealand literature, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1995, an Honorary Visiting Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, in 1997, and awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters by the University of Bristol in 2001. His tenth novel, Mansfield, will be published in May 2004. He is married with three children and (to date) six grandchildren.

Selected Bibliography

Poetry:

1. Whether the Will is Free: Poems 1954-62. Hamilton: Paul’s Book Arcade, 1964.
2. Crossing the Bar. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1972.
3. Quesada: Poems 1972-74. Auckland: The Shed, 1975.
4. Walking Westward. Auckland: The Shed, 1979.
5. Geographies. Auckland: Auckland / Oxford University Press, 1982.
6. Poems of a Decade. Dunedin: Pilgrims South Press, 1983.
7. Paris: a Poem. Illustrated by Gregory O’Brien. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1984.
8. Between. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988.
9. Voices. Wellington: GP Books, 1990.
10. Straw into Gold: New and Selected Poems. Auckland: Auckland University Press.
11. The Right Thing. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000.
12. Dog. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002.
13. The Red Tram. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004.
14. The Black River. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007.
15. Collected Poems 1951-2006. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008.
16. The Yellow Buoy: Poems 2007–2012. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2013.

Fiction:

1. Smith’s Dream. Auckland: Longman Paul, 1971.
2. Five for the Symbol. Auckland: Longman Paul, 1981. [stories]
3. All Visitors Ashore. London: Harvill; Auckland: Collins, 1984.
4. The Death of the Body. London: Collins, 1986.
5. Sister Hollywood. London: Collins, 1989.
6. The End of the Century at the End of the World. London: Harvill, 1992.
7. The Singing Whakapapa. Auckland: Penguin, 1994.
8. Villa Vittoria. Auckland: Penguin, 1997.
9. The Blind Blonde with Candles in Her Hair. Auckland: Penguin, 1998. [stories]
10. Talking About O’Dwyer. Auckland: Penguin, 1999.
11. The Secret History of Modernism. London: Harvill, 2001.
12. Mansfield: a novel. London: Harvill, 2004.
13. My Name was Judas. London: Harvill Secker, 2006.
14. Risk: a novel. London: MacLehose, 2012.

Non-fiction:

1. The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot. London: Hutchinson, 1964.
2. In the Glass Case: Essays on New Zealand Literature. Auckland: Auckland / Oxford University Press, 1982.
3. Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1986.
4. Answering to the Language. Auckland, Auckland University Press, 1989.
5. The Writer at Work. Dunedin, University of Otago Press, 2000.
6. Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002.
7. Book Self: The Reader as Writer and the Writer as Critic. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008.
8. South-West of Eden: A Memoir 1932-1956. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010.

Edited:

1. New Zealand Short Stories. Second Series. London, Oxford University Press, 1964.
2. Shakespeare: Measure for Measure. A Casebook. London, Macmillan, 1971.
3. The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
4. The Collected Stories of Maurice Duggan. Auckland: Auckland University Press & Oxford University Press, 1981.
5. The Faber Book of Contemporary South Pacific Stories. London, Faber, 1994.
6. Werner Forman's New Zealand. Auckland: Whitcoulls, 1994.

Biography:

1. Panny, Judith Dell. Plume of Bees: A Literary Biography of C. K. Stead. Cape Catley, Auckland, 2009.