Latest news with #DavidEggleton
Otago Daily Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Dunedin author wins top award for her poetry
Emma Neale. Photo: supplied A Dunedin author has been honoured at the country's biggest literary arts awards. Editor, novelist and poet Emma Neale won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry for her collection Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in Auckland last night. Poetry category convener of judges David Eggleton said the collection of poems displayed an exceptional ability to turn confessional anecdotes into "quicksilvery flashes of insight". "Emma Neale is a writer fantastically sensitive to figurative language and its possibilities," he said. Her book was about fibs, fables and telling true stories, which were perceived by others as tall stories and the knock-on or flow-on effects of distrust — the scales dropping from one's eyes. Mr Eggleton said it was about power and a sense of powerlessness, belief and the loss of belief, about trust and disillusion, disenchantment with fairytales and compassion. The book, published by the Otago University Press, was nominated for the award alongside Hopurangi — Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka, by Robert Sullivan; In the Half Light of a Dying Day, by C.K. Stead; and Slender Volumes, by Richard von Sturmer. Neale had told the Otago Daily Times being shortlisted felt like an award in itself, feeling that the judges had read her work and seen merit in it was "really, really gratifying". — APL
RNZ News
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Book awards and fast favourites with David Eggleton
Welcome to May and a bumper crop of cultural events. There are significant book festivals in Tāmaki Makaurau and the Wairarapa. Its New Zealand Music Month, including the Aotearoa Music Awards. Not to mention the International NZ Comedy Festival, major national art fairs and the annual Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. All of which makes this week's Culture 101 Fast Favourite guest an easy pick, given he embraces all of these fields, often at once. Ōtepoti Dunedin's David Eggleton is a writer, performer and art critic. He is our former Poet Laureate and a recipient of a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. This year Eggleton is the convenor of the judges for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockhams. And while he's in Tāmaki Makaurau for the awards, his poetry-music duo Wildcards Aotearoa will be performing alongside another longtime collaborator singer songwriter Otis Mace, May 9th and 10th in Kumeu and Point Chevalier respectively.
