Siobhan Harvey is the author of eight books, including the 2013 Kathleen Grattan Award winning, Cloudboy (Otago University Press, 2014) and, as co-editor, the best selling, Essential New Zealand Poems (Godwit, Random House New Zealand, 2014). She was awarded the 2020 New Zealand Society of Authors Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship and in 2009 held ARC Writer in Residence at Awhitu Regional Park. She won 2020 Robert Burns Poetry Prize, 2019 Kathleen Grattan Award for a Sequence of Poems and 2016 Write Well Award for Fiction (US), and was runner-up in 2015 and 2014 New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competitions, 2012 Dorothy Poetry Poetry Prize (Aus), 2012 Kevin Ireland Poetry Prize, 2011 Landfall Essay Prize and 2009 and 2008 Bernard Gadd Poetry Prizes. She was also longlisted for the 2019 Australian Book Review Peter Porter Poetry Prize (Aus). Her fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry have been published in numerous local and international anthologies, including Best of Auckland (Writers Cafe, 2020), Bonsai: best small fictions from Aotearoa New Zealand (Canterbury University Press, 2018), Feminine Divine: Voices of Power and Invisibility (Cyren, US, 2019), Leaving the Red Zone: poems for the Canterbury earthquake (Clerestory, 2016), Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 political poems (OUP, 2017) and Wild Honey: reading New Zealand women's poetry (Massey University Press, 2019). Her work has also been published in international and local journals such as Arc (Ca), Asian Literary Review (HK), Griffith Review (Aus), Shenandoah (US), Sobotka (US), Stand (UK) and Structo (UK). She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at AUT. She holds a BA in Creative Writing (Manchester) and MA in Creative Writing (Sheffield), and is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing. A new collection of poetry and creative nonfiction, Ghosts (OUP, 2021) is forthcoming.
Harvey comments: 'We're a nation formed from indigenous and multicultural migrants. Our journeys, settlements, dislocations and assimilations are personal and collective. Sometimes, these are new beginnings, ripened with hope; sometimes, they are exiles, physical ends to disturbing pasts. Irrespective of the reasons for our arrivals, we've always brought with us our ghosts: in our oral and printed narratives; in our memories; in the bloodlines of our whakapapa. "My Mother is a Ghost Living in My Mind" responds to this often unspoken, ethereal burden our peoples continue to bear. The mother in the poem is a confessional and collective symbol: a whānau member lost to the narrator because of their migration. The poem proposes a truth I know from experience: that even those we're estranged from before exile, continue to conduct spectral relationships - emotionally, psychologically, memorially - with us after we become citizens elsewhere. Indeed the poem proposes that the geographical distance between the exile and their alienating relatives can add complexity to the relationship, particularly so during the lonely times of Lockdown when imagination has ample latitude to replay and reconsider the past and the extensive hinterland owhat might have been". Across all cultures in Aotearoa, there are innumerable stories of positive migrant experiences. This poem isn't a critic or denier of these. Rather it narrates the other truths exiles can experience when alienation by family, culture and country occurs.'
Links
Siobhan Harvey, Poetry Archive
Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer file
Academy of New Zealand Literature member page
Photographer credit: Liz March