Bill Manhire

The Brain of Katherine Mansfield

Marion McLeod

Combines outstanding contemporary New Zealand fiction with some of the best from the past. The New Zealand of these stories is not the country presented in glossy brochures, but a real place that can only be described, with accuracy and vision, by the imagination.

The New Zealand Short Story Collection

An anthology of writing from 70 writers who have been involved with the editor's writing course. Contributions are included from many of the most well-known contemporary writers, along with essays on creative writing, and Manhire's own introduction, exercises, and notes. Brief biographical notes are given for most of the writers.

Bill Manhire's Creative Writing Course at Victoria

Mutes & Earthquakes

Building on previous themes and introducing some new techniques, this collection reveals a respected poet at the height of his powers. Here are finely crafted lyrics, found poems, a bracket of songs, and complex emotions—all tempered by the use of humor.

The Victims of Lightning

The wide white page spans eight centuries of writing - from Dante's epic account of Ulysses's last southbound ocean journey to Michael Chabon's writing of a WWII US army base on the ice, in Kavalier and Clay. There is fiction and poetry from nearly a dozen different countries, and genres range from Coleridge's Rime of the ancient mariner, via H.P. Lovecraft's Gothic fantasy and Kim Stanley Robinson future fiction, to the surreal comedy of Monty Python's Scott of the Sahara." --book jacket.

Writers Imagine Antarctica

The Wide White Page

Covering seventy years of New Zealand short stories, this book is a mix of established greats, such as Sargeson and Davin, and developing writers such as Emily Perkins and Barbara Anderson.

New Zealand's Best Short Stories

Some Other Country

Damien Wilkins

Chris Price

Ken Duncum

Contains writing prompts to help beginning writers and to help tackle writer's block. In between are exercises from a host of New Zealand and international writers that explore the nuts and bolts of craft - in poetry, fiction and scriptwriting - along with others that tap into sources of inspiration or show the value of revision and editing.

Creative Writing Exercises from Victoria University's Institute of Modern Letters

The Exercise Book

Paul Callaghan

Paul T. Callaghan

Ten New Zealand writers respond to physics, with short stories, poetry, essays and a comic.

The Parallel Universes of New Zealand Writers and Scientists

Are Angels OK?

A Poetry Book Society Winter 2020 Recommendation Bill Manhire's Wow opens with the voice of an extinct bird, a song from anciency, and takes us forward into the present and the darkening future of other extinctions. For Manhire, the reach of the lyric is long: it has the penetration of comedy, satire, the Jeremiad, but also the delicacy of minute detail and the rhythms of nature's comfort and hope, the promise of renewal. In the title poem the baby says 'Wow', and the wonder is real at the world and at language. But the world will have the last word. Writing of Manhire, Teju Cole declared, 'Being the leading poet in New Zealand is like being the best DJ in Estonia, impressive enough on its own terms. But Bill Manhire is more than that: he's unquestionably world-class. As with Seamus Heaney, you get a sense of someone with a steady hand on the tiller, and both the will and the craft to take your breath away.' Bill Manhire was New Zealand's first poet laureate. He established and until recently directed the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. This is the ninth of his Carcanet books in 30 years. They include a Selected and a Collected Poems.

Bill Manhire takes the books and poems he loves out of the pupil and lecture hall and returns them to their readers. In these pages unlikely people rub shoulders - Ralph Hotere and Philip Larkin, Sylivia Plath and James K. Baxter, Maurice Gee and Laura Ranger - Then along the way Manhire investigates why the world's best poems sound like dirty songs, tell outrageous lies, and thrive on their own mistakes. These essays and interviews will not tell you what to think, but they will probably inspire you to do your own thinking.

Bill Manhire

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