Poet Fleur Adcock to receive honorary doctorate

victoria-university-of-wellington

Thu Jul 26 2007 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)

Poet Fleur Adcock to receive honorary doctorate

Thursday, 26 July 2007, 2:08 pm
Press Release: Victoria University of Wellington

26 July 2007

Internationally renowned poet Fleur Adcock is to receive an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Ms Adcock will receive the honorary Doctorate of Literature at the graduation ceremony for the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences in Wellington on 11 December.

Announcing the honour Vice-Chancellor Professor Pat Walsh said Fleur Adcock’s literary contribution in New Zealand, England and further afield could not be under-estimated.

“Fleur is unquestionably one of our finest expatriate writers, in the tradition of Katherine Mansfield, Janet Frame, Robin Hyde, and Dan Davin. While she is best known for her poetry, which has been described as ‘richly intelligent’, she has also found success as translator, editor, musical collaborator and teacher.”

Born in 1934, Fleur Adcock spent the war years growing up in England, returning to New Zealand in 1947. A student at Victoria from 1951-1955, she gained a Bachelor (1954), and Master of Arts (1956) in Classics. Her first published poems appeared in the University’s student newspaper Salient in 1952.

Fleur has had numerous collections of poetry published, her first being The Eye of the Hurricane in 1964, as well as two collections–Selected Poems (1983) and Poems 1960-2000 (2000). In addition she has been the editor of several anthologies including The Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (1982) and The Faber Book of 20th-Century Women's Poetry (1987).

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She won her first recognition as a poet by winning the Festival of Wellington Poetry Award in 1961, and although she moved to England in 1963, she continued to receive recognition and acclaim in New Zealand. She won the New Zealand State Literary Fund Award for Achievement in 1964, the Jesse MacKay Prize in 1968 and again in 1972, and the Buckland Award, for the year’s outstanding work of literature, in both 1968 and 1979. In 1984 Fleur Adcock received the New Zealand National Book Award.

The accolades continued in England. In 1976 she was granted a Cholmondeley Award for Poets which recognised her achievement in, and contribution to, poetry. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and won an Arts Council Writers' Award four years later. This was followed by an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1996, and being made an Honorary Fellow of the English Association in 2001.

In the early 1980’s, Fleur had several collaborations with New Zealand composer Gillian Whitehead, herself the holder of an honorary doctorate from Victoria. These included a libretto, and later opera, about Eleanor of Aquitaine, the libretto Hotspur, The King of the Other Country, and Out of this Nettle, Danger a setting of texts compiled by Fleur from the writings of Katherine Mansfield.

Last year, Fleur Adcock was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, only the second New Zealander to win the award, the late Allen Curnow being the first in 1989; past recipients include W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Stevie Smith. On conferring the Medal, the statement from Buckingham Palace cited the "widespread critical acclaim" her volume Poems 1960-2000 had received.

She has made several translations of Romanian and medieval Latin poems, delivered talks on poetry for the BBC, and served in several fellowship positions at English universities. Currently she is an occasional tutor in advanced poetry at the Arvon Foundation for Writing.

In recent years she has taken a keen interest in the global warming debate, and last year made one of her poems, "A Rose Tree", available for an Oxfam CD as part of the Poets for Oxfam group.

Issued by Victoria University of Wellington Public Affairs

Fleur Adcock - Bibliography

The Eye of the Hurricane – Reed (New Zealand), 1964
Tigers – Oxford University Press (OUP), 1967
High Tide in the Garden – OUP, 1971
The Scenic Route – OUP, 1974
New Poetry Four – (ed. with Anthony Thwaite) Hutchinson, 1978
Below Loughrigg – Bloodaxe, 1979
The Inner Harbour – OUP, 1979
The Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry -– (ed.) OUP, 1982
Selected Poems – OUP, 1983
The Virgin and the Nightingale: Medieval Latin Poems – (translator) Bloodaxe, 1983
Hotspur: A Ballad for Music – (libretto) Bloodaxe, 1986
The Incident Book – OUP, 1986
The Faber Book of 20th-Century Women's Poetry – (ed.) Faber and Faber, 1987
Meeting the Comet – Bloodaxe, 1988
Orient Express - Poems by Grete Tartler – (translator) OUP, 1989
Time-Zones – OUP, 1991
Letters from Darkness – Poems by Daniela Crasnaru – (translator) OUP, 1991
Hugh Primas and the Archpoet – (translator and ed.) Cambridge University Press, 1994
The Oxford Book of Creatures – (ed. with Jacqeline Simms) OUP, 1995
Cherries on a Plate – (contributor) Vintage (New Zealand), 1997
Looking Back – OUP, 1997
Poems 1960-2000 – Bloodaxe, 2000

ENDS

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