Our guide to our resources, the information you'll find in them and when to try elsewhere
Thomas Allen Munro Curnow (1911 - 2001)
Allen Curnow, New Zealand poetry’s elder statesman, was educated at Christchurch Boy’s High School and at Canterbury and Auckland University Colleges. He worked as a journalist on The Sun in Christchurch, 1929 - 30, turned briefly to the church but did not complete his theological studies, and from 1935 to 1948 was a reporter, sub-editor and reviewer with The Press. He established an early and lifelong friendship and collaboration with Denis Glover and began contributing to Caxton Press Publications as well as the radical journal Tomorrow.
Slender volumes during the thirties and the war period demonstrated his growing technical mastery and widening of thematic scope; but it was his Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923 - 45, with his striking introductory analysis, that was to make him an influential national figure. He spent 1949 with the News Chronicle in London and then, for a quarter of a century, combined the careers of academic and poet at the University of Auckland and a long and distinguished career continues in his official retirement.
'All poems are rash acts', he wrote in an account of his work. His best poetry he defined as 'little of the little I know of myself and the world.'
Allen Curnow has been awarded numerous literary honours, including an honourary D.Litt from the University of Canterbury, the New Zealand Book Award for poetry on six occasions, a fellowship at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington, the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, a C.B.E. and membership of the Order of New Zealand. His work as a literary theorist helped shape the texts of many poets and writers of fiction and his satirical verse, under the pen name of 'Whim-Wham', delighted newspaper readers every Saturday for half a century.
Sources
The Christchurch Writer’s Walkway, E. Beardsley, Canterbury Branch, New Zealand Society of Authors, 1999.
