Sophie van Waardenberg is the author of No Good (Auckland University Press, 2025), winner of the Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry and shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. Her poetry and reviews appear in Cordite, Copper Nickel, Landfall Tauraka, The Aotearoa NZ Review of Books, takahē, The Spinoff and elsewhere.

What first drew you to poetry, and what keeps you coming back to it?

I’m sure this sounds a bit dickheaded, but I’ve been writing poetry since I worked out how to write sentences. I think I’ve loved language, its attitude and rhythm and sense, forever. Reading good stuff keeps me writing my own poetry; I’m just anxious to be part of all that music. I don’t want to be left out.

Tell us about your shortlisted collection. What inspired it, or what do you hope readers discover in its pages?

It’s been a year since No Good was released and I still don’t know how to tell anyone about it. It is about, and has emerged from, the normal things: love and grief. In it there is a dead dad and an ex-girlfriend and beer and motels and lots of complaining about the weather.

National Poetry Day is all about encouraging people to read and enjoy poetry. If you could recommend one poem (or poet) for someone who thinks poetry isn't for them, what would you choose and why?

I’m always going on about this one: Frank O’Hara’s ‘Having a Coke with You’. It is one of my favourite poems and I think anyone can read it and understand it right away, even if they don’t like poetry, even if they have tried and tried to like poetry and have given up. It is a love poem, a poem about how art is not as good as love — and yet it betrays the poet’s love for art just as much as it embalms his love for the world and for this person. It goes at the speed of a mind in love and it is beautiful.

Where do poems usually find you? Do you have a favourite place, ritual or unexpected moment when ideas tend to arrive?

I don’t believe in ideas (because they are boring). Lines are everywhere, though, and they go into my notes app and more often than not they wither up there. Sometimes they get mulched up into a poem. I do also carry around a real paper notebook; it’s full of drivel.

Is there a line of poetry that has stayed with you over the years? We'd love to hear it (and why it continues to resonate).

From Robert Frost’s ‘Birches’: ‘Earth’s the right place for love: / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.’

Now that a little time has passed since the awards, what are you working on next, or what can readers look forward to from you?

I’ve been writing lots of rubbish poems about nuns and dentists. For sure I’d like to write another book, but it’s not likely to be about anything worth summarising.