Maori Poet wins Burns Fellowship

Te Ao Hou, March 1974, Page 6

Maori Poet wins Burns Fellowship Hone Tuwhare, our foremost Maori poet, has been awarded the University of Otago Burns Fellowship for 1974. Mr Tuwhare held a special short-term Burns Fellowship during 1969, the university's centennial year. He is best known as a poet, although he has published some prose fiction. His poems have been included in a number of anthologies and publications used in schools in New Zealand and Australia. His first volume of poems, ‘No Ordinary Sun’, was published in 1964 and has since been reprinted six times. ‘Come Rain, Hail’ followed in 1970, and a third collection, ‘Sapwood and Milk’, was published in 1972 and reprinted in 1973. A fourth volume of poems is being prepared. Hone Tuwhare says his plans for this year are flexible but he ‘will welcome the opportunity while 1974 Burns Fellow to demonstrate a ruthlessness in confining myself more fully to my trade as a poet.’ Born at Kaikohe in 1922, Mr Tuwhare, after finishing his formal aducation at Beresford Street School in Auckland, was apprenticed to the boilermaking trade. He has worked at hydro-electric power projects on the Waikato River, the Rangiteiki River, Bay of Plenty, and in the naval dockyard at Devonport, Auckland. Last year Hone was one of three Pacific poets who read their works at the Waratah and Sydney Opera House Opening Festival, performing at the Opera House, universities and several venues in Sydney, together with Albert Wendt of Western Samoa and John Kasaipwalova of Papua, New Guinea.