Turner, Brian

[Photograph: Sharron Bennett]

Brian Turner (b. 1944)

Contents:

Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance (2006):

Trout
Training on the Peninsula
Fish
Pig
One Night Stand
In the Swim

Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive (2004):

CD37

1. In the Swim
2. Like Lamplight
3. Take Heart
4. The River in You
5. Panoply
6. Trout
7. Training on the Peninsula
8. The Dissolute Life
9. Fish
10. Bird
11. Blind Child and the Moon
12. Pig
13. One Night Stand

Waiata Archive (1974):

CD 14

Song of the Bumble-Bee
The Tenant
Air & the Invalid Factory
Thunderer
Run Rabbit Run
Hawk
Trout
Over the Fence
What Can You Expect
Carey’s Bay
Driving South
The Initiation

Bio /Bibliography:

(b. Dunedin, 1944):

Brian Turner is a New Zealand poet, playwright, freelance writer and editor whose varied output includes non-fiction books, TV scripts and several volumes of poetry.

His journalism has appeared in the New Zealand Listener, North and South, Metro, Sunday Times, National Business Review, The Independent, Evening Post, The Dominion, the Otago Daily Times , The Press, Fish and Game New Zealand and elsewhere.

He has written on a diversity of subjects: sport, recreation, conservation, current affairs and literature among them.

Brian Turner’s poetry and non-fiction has appeared in a great many publications both here and overseas, and his work is included in major anthologies of New Zealand writing.

His awards include the NZ Book Award for Poetry in 1993 and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1979. He was Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 1984, and in 1985 he won the John Cowie Memorial Award for Playwriting. In 1994 he was awarded an Arts Council Scholarship in Letters, and in 1997 he was Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury.

In the Seventies he won the Dulux Prize for Sports Journalism.

He is working on new poems and prose, including a collection of his writings on trout fishing.

His publications include:

POETRY

Ladders of Rain, (John McIndoe Limited, 1978) - joint winner Commonwealth Poetry prize;
Ancestors, (John McIndoe, 1981) - shortlisted NZ Book Award for Poetry;
Listening to the River, (John McIndoe, 1983);
Bones, (John McIndoe, 1985), shortlisted NZ Book Award for Poetry;
All that Blue Can Be, (John McIndoe, 1989);
Beyond, (McIndoe, 1992), winner NZ Book Award for Poetry 1993;
Timeless Land, (Longacre Press,1995), a work comprising over 50 full colour reproductions of paintings by Grahame Sydney, new and previously-published poems by Brian Turner, and stories by Owen Marshall, the focus on an exploration of inland Otago and the central South Island. (An essay on the work of Sydney appears in The Art of Grahame Sydney, Longacre Press, 2000);
Taking Off (Victoria University Press, 2001), shortlisted NZ Book Award for Poetry

His poetry has also appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, both in NZ and overseas, including: The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (Penguin, 1985 and 1989); The Oxford Book of New Zealand Writing Since 1945 (OUP, 1983); An Anthology of New Zealand Twentieth Century Poetry, Third Edition (OUP, 1987); Sixteen New Zealand Poets (Longman Paul,1995); the Oxford Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (OUP,1997); the Oxford Companion to the Year (OUP, 1999); New Zealand Love Poems (OUP, 2000); Essential New Zealand Poems (Random, 2001).