David Eggleton

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

David Eggleton (born 1952) is a New Zealand poet, critic and writer. He has published more than 18 poetry books since 1986, including work with Penguin, and his collection The Conch Trumpet (Otago University Press, 2015) won the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for poetry. In 2016 he also received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement, and he was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2022. He edits and reviews widely, has won six Montana New Zealand Reviewer of the Year awards, and was editor of Landfall, New Zealand’s leading literary journal, from 2010 to 2017.

Eggleton was born in Auckland to a mixed European, Tongan and Rotuman heritage. He spent part of his youth in Fiji and Auckland and dropped out of school to pursue performance music and poetry. He later settled in Dunedin in the 1980s, where he has lived since. He is also an art critic for Art New Zealand and has produced multimedia poetry projects, as well as histories of New Zealand music and photography. He has received a Robert Burns Fellowship (1990) and a Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writers’ Residency (2017). His poetry is often anti-establishment, using sharp humor and a fast, fluent rhythm.