Guest speaker Wellington poet, Geoff Cochrane

Bernadette Hall is a well-known, award-winning Canterbury poet.

She has held the Ursula Bethell and the Robert Burns Fellowships and in 2006 was Writer in Residence at Victoria University. In 2004 she shared an Antarctic Arts Award with her friend, the Dunedin artist, Kathryn Madill. Their collaboration resulted in The Ponies published by VUP in 2007.

In a review in The Press, Tom Weston wrote, ‘The Ponies is an enormously accomplished collection, tempting a reviewer to reach a grab-bag of hyperbole. It’s funny and sad by turns, attractive and engaging throughout … This is an essential collection for anyone interested in New Zealand poetry.’

An earlier collaboration between Hall and Madill, Settler Dreaming, was shortlisted for the Tasmanian Pacific Poetry Prize. Halls’ essay on the art of Kathryn Madill is included in Look This Way: New Zealand writers on New Zealand artists  (ed Sally Blundell, AUP, 2007)

In 2007 Hall spent six months in Co. Cork on the Rathcoola Fellowship. The Lustre Jug, her ninth collection of poetry, arises from this Irish experience, made more potent by the fact that her father was born in Ireland.

For ten years she was the poetry editor of the Christchurch based literary journal, Takahe. And for five years she was poetry editor for the Christchurch Press. In 2003 she received a Press Literary Liasion Award for her contribution to literature in the South Island.

Most recently her work has appeared in 20 Contemporary New Zealand Poets (VUP/Carcanet UK) and in the anthology Moonlight edited by Andrew Johnston.  

She is a founding staff member of the Hagley Writers’ Institute.