Vincent O'Sullivan

Vincent Gerard O’Sullivan, DCNZM (born 28 September 1937, in Auckland, New Zealand) is one of New Zealand's best-known writers. He is a poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, critic, editor, biographer, and librettist. The recipient of many literary prizes and residencies, in 2000 O’Sullivan was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. He was awarded the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer’s Fellowship in 2004 and the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2006. He was the New Zealand Poet Laureate for the term 2013–2015. The son of Timothy O'Sullivan (b. Tralee, Ireland) and Myra O'Sullivan (née McKean), O'Sullivan is the youngest of five. His first marriage was to Tui Rererangi Walsh, with whom he had two children, Dominic O'Sullivan (1970) and Deirdre O'Sullivan (1973).

He attended St Joseph's Primary, Grey Lynn, and Sacred Heart College, Auckland, which is a Catholic school in Glendowie. He graduated from the University of Auckland and Oxford University and lectured at Victoria University of Wellington (1963–66) and the University of Waikato (1968–78).

He served as literary editor of the NZ Listener (1979–80), and then (1981–87) won a series of writer’s residencies and research fellowships in universities in Australia and New Zealand: Victoria (Wellington), Tasmania, Deakin (Geelong), Flinders (South Australia), Western Australia and Queensland. These were interrupted by a year as resident playwright at Downstage Theatre, Wellington (1983). In 1988 he resumed his academic career at Victoria University of Wellington, where he was Professor of English Literature until his retirement in 2004.

He lives in Dunedin.

• 1966 NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry
• 1994 Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship
• 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry
• 2000 Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit
• 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry
• 2006 Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement
• 2016 Honoured New Zealand Writer

Poetry

• 1965 Our Burning Time
• 1969 Revenants
• 1973 Bearings
• 1976 From the Indian Funeral
• 1977 Butcher & Co.
• 1980 Brother Jonathan, Brother Kafka (with prints by John Drawbridge)
• 1982 The Rose Ballroom and Other Poems
• 1982 The Butcher Papers
• 1986 The Pilate Tapes
• 1992 Selected Poems
• 1988 Seeing You Asked
• 2001 Lucky Table
• 2004Nice Morning for It, Adam
• 2004 Homecoming - Te Hokinga Mai
• 2007 Blame Vermeer
• 2009 Further Convictions Pending: Poems 1998–2008
• 2011 The Movie May Be Slightly Different
• 2013 Us, Then
• 2015 Being Here: Selected Poems
• 2016 And So It Is: New Poems

Short stories

• 1978 The Boy, The Bridge, The River
• 1981 Dandy Edison for Lunch and Other Stories
• 1985 Survivals
• 1990 The Snow in Spain: Short Stories
• 1992 Palms and Minarets: Selected Stories
• 2014 The Families: Stories

Novels

• 1976 Miracle: A Romance
• 1993 Let the River Stand
• 2018 All This By Chance

Plays

• 1983 Shuriken (Downstage, Wellington)
• 1983 Lysistrata (not performed)
• 1984 Ordinary Nights in Ward 10 (New Depot, Wellington)
• 1988 Jones and Jones (Downstage, Wellington)
• 1989 Billy (Bats Theatre, Wellington)
• 1994 The Lives and Loves of Harry and George (Downstage, Wellington)
• 1996 Take the Moon, Mr Casement (Court Theatre, Christchurch)
• 2003 Yellow Brides

Nonfiction

• 1974 Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand (revised 2013)
• 1976 James K. Baxter (New Zealand Writers and Their Work series)
• 2002 On Longing (Montana Essay Series)
• 2003 Long Journey to the Border: A Life of John Mulgan

Edited works

• 1970 An Anthology of Twentieth-Century New Zealand Poetry (revised 1976 and 1987)
• 1975 New Zealand Short Stories: Third Series
• 1983 The Oxford Anthology of New Zealand Writing Since 1945, co-editor with MacDonald P. Jackson
• 1982 The Aloe, with Prelude
• 1985 Collected Poems: Ursula Bethell
• 1988 Poems of Katherine Mansfield
• 1989 The Selected Letters of Katherine Mansfield
• 1992 The Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories
• 1993 Intersecting Lines: The Memoirs of Ian Milner
• 1997 New Zealand Stories: Katherine Mansfield
• 1984, 1987, 1993, 1996, 2003 The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (vols. 1–5), co-editor with Margaret Scott
• 2006, 2012 The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1916–1922 (vols. 1–2), co-editor with Gerri Kimber

Librettos

• 2002 Black Ice (with composer Ross Harris)
• 2004 Lines from the Beach House (with composer David Farquhar)
• 2008 The Floating Bride, the Crimson Village (with composer Ross Harris)
• 2010 The Abiding Tides (with composer Ross Harris)
• 2012 Songs for Beatrice: Making Light of Time (with composer Ross Harris)
• 2014 Notes from the Front: Songs on Alexander Aitken (with composer Ross Harris)
• 2014 Requiem for the Fallen (with composer Ross Harris)
• 2014 If Blood Be the Price (with composer Ross Harris)
• 2016 Brass Poppies (with composer Ross Harris)
• 2018 Face (with composer Ross Harris)

Festschrift

• 2007 Still Shines When You Think of It, edited by Bill Manhire and Peter Whiteford

On writing

• 'Frankly, I do think I’ve got a considerable gift for buggering around. And I don’t think that hurts, for a writer. I haven’t got the temperament to just be at the workface, the coalface, every day.'
• 'To me, writing is a solitary vice, really. You lock yourself in a room and don’t like anyone finding you doing it.'
• 'I'm always very impressed by writers who have a very strict regimen that they keep to. I admire it, but I certainly don't envy it.'
• 'If I may rattle the banner for a moment, poetry is hospitable to pretty much anything, other than the cosy and complacent.'
• 'I don't think many prescriptions for poetry stand up apart from one – if it isn't individual, if it's not "the cry of its occasion", then why aren't we doing something else?'

On age

• 'I just think that if you lose your capacity for being moved or angered by things that may have provoked you 20 years ago, if you've levelled off to that extent, I think the board's been playing just a bit too thin. I wouldn't care for that. I'd hate to think my last years were spent benignly on my veranda in a rocking chair, saying, "G'day" to everyone who goes past.'

On war

• 'I wouldn't say Ross [Harris] and I were obsessed with the war. It just strikes us, as I expect it does a lot of New Zealanders, as one of the major events in our history. So obviously how it affected young men at that time, and civilians and women and families, is of great interest to us because we are New Zealanders.'

On Katherine Mansfield

• 'It has always struck me as a curious thing, how readers at times so hanker to own an author, beyond carrying her books in a shoulder bag, or reading her in a library. That urge to get closer, to know what life was like when she wasn’t writing, to pick up scraps she didn’t know she had let drop.'

On Ralph Hotere

• 'The marae, the church, the school, the people. The four shaping presences for the young Hotere. Then that dark fifth, the War.'
• 'There’s a very interesting paradox at the heart of Hotere’s best work; he is the most important political painter we have and yet at the same time he is so attentive to aesthetic values.'