Q & A with C. K. Stead

Photo: Marti Friedlander

C. K. Stead is an award-winning novelist, poet, literary critic, and essayist. He served as New Zealand’s Poet Laureate from 2015–2017, has received the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, and is a Member of the Order of New Zealand. His latest poetry collection, In the Half Light of a Dying Day (Auckland University Press), was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. An emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland, he is one of the country’s most distinguished literary figures.

What draws you to write poetry - and what keeps bringing you back to the form?

For me a poem has to have a shape, but not necessarily one or another of the traditional forms. It may find its own form as it goes. This is a mystery and depends on instinct – in the reader as well as in the poet. Language is what makes the human animal special, and poetry is language at its most demanding and most rewarding. It is not everyone’s cup of tea but it has always been mine.

Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day brings poetry into the public realm. What do you think about this kind of poetic visibility - and where would you love to see one of your own poems appear?

Good idea, yes of course. One of my poems was painted (with official approval) on one of the giant silos on the Auckland waterfront. Not my idea, but welcome.

Why do you think a day dedicated to poetry, in all its forms, still matters now?

I doubt that it matters to everyone but it certainly does to those (probably a minority, but an important one) who care deeply about language and literature.

What threads or obsessions run through your shortlisted collection, and did anything surprise you as the work came together?

The obsessions I suppose were only the usual preoccupations of poetry – Time, Life, Sex and Death. The poems themselves came as a series of surprises, one after another, as a response to my unusual circumstances at the time of writing.

Tell us about a poem, poet, or line that’s currently living in your head - and why it resonates with you.

John Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal Upon Saint Lucy’s Day’ – an elegy which I have by heart and recite to myself sometimes at 3 or 4 a.m., one of the greatest poems in the English language, dark, complex in form, compelling, and mysteriously eloquent.

What does it mean to have your collection recognised in this way - and what do you hope readers might take from it?

It’s a source of satisfaction, a welcome confirmation and endorsement. The hope is that readers will take pleasure in the poems, one by one, and perhaps discover something new and rewarding.