Robert Sullivan (poet)

Robert Sullivan is of Māori and Irish Galway descent. He belongs to the Māori tribes Ngā Puhi (Ngāti Manu/Ngāti Hau) as well as to Kāi Tahu and describes himself as multicultural.[1]

He graduated from the University of Auckland with a PhD and worked as Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Programme at the University of Hawai'i.[2] Sullivan led until recently the creative writing programme at the Manukau Institute of Technology before becoming the Deputy Chief Executive Māori there from 2018-2020.[3]

Robert Sullivan's nine books include the bestselling Star Waka, reprinted five times and shortlisted in 2000 for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Maui: Legends of the Outcast, illustrated by Chris Slane, the first New Zealand graphic novel, was shortlisted for the LIANZA Russell Clark Medal. His book-length poem Captain Cook in the Underworld was long-listed for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in the Poetry Category. It is also the libretto for an oratorio by noted composer John Psathas which has been performed at the Wellington and Auckland Town Halls by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the Orpheus Choir of Wellington. His first collection, Jazz Waiata, won the PEN (NZ) Best First Book Award, and his children's retelling of Māori myths and legends, Weaving Earth and Sky, illustrated by Gavin Bishop, won the non-fiction category and was Children's Book of the Year in the 2003 New Zealand Post Children's Book Awards. The Polynesian poetry anthology he coedited, Whetu Moana, won the reference and anthology category in the 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. The Māori poetry anthology he coedited, Puna Wai Kōrero, won the 2015 Creative Writing category in the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards[4][5]

His wide ranging work explores dimensions of Māori tradition as well as "contemporary urban experiences, including local racial and social concerns."[6] His writing has a post modern feel and shows acute awareness of important Aotearoa/New Zealand issues while linking them in a complex way back to the cultural past.[7]

In the poetic narrative Star Waka (1999) for example, Sullivan employs traditional Māori story-telling techniques (oral tradition) in order to link contemporary and traditional topics from Aotearoa/New Zealand with concepts and ideas from a European background. This approach allows him to study the identity relation between Māori and Pākehā within transcultural themes of voyaging, personal and national, of the poet and of Māori. In a sense, the poems in Star Waka "themselves function like a waka."[8] "Star Waka" was "lauded for its poetic flair".[2]

He is "widely seen as one of the most important contemporary Māori poets."[9]

Robert Sullivan's Shout Ha! is heralded as a stunning symphony of love, politics, tenderness, confession, sharpness and insight which should be in every New Zealand school library as it accounts for the history and politics of the country.

Sullivan uses a wide-ranging voice who makes complex content, simple in execution. His book Cassino City of Martyrs, in part is a song for Sullivan's grandfather who fought in Italy. Cassino is inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy with its various descents, ascents, spirals and authorial intrusions.

Like Dante, Sullivan brings together life on many levels - from the personal to the cultural, from the political to the emotional. Like the Italian poet, he favours a cheeky vernacular as well as an elegant phrasing. Sullivan draws upon his own loves and losses in a way that refreshes our engagement with all things human.[10]

• Jazz Waiata (1990)
• Piki Ake!: Poems 1990-92 (1993)
• Maui - Legends of the Outcast (1996)
• Star Waka (1999; German translation: Sternen-Waka, 2012)
• Weaving Earth and Sky : Myths & Legends of Aotearoa (2002)
• Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002)
• Voice Carried My Family (2005)
• Shout Ha! to the Sky (2010)
• Cassino: City of Martyrs (2010)

• Mauri Ola:Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (2010) coedited with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri
• Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (2003) coedited with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri
• Puna Wai Kōrero: An Anthology of Māori Poetry in English (2014) coedited with Reina Whaitiri

• Academy of New Zealand Literature author page
• New Zealand Literature File: Robert Sullivan
• New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre: Robert Sullivan
• Pasifika Poetry: Video-Interview with Robert Sullivan, conducted by Selina Tusitala Marsh
• WaterBridge Review (January 2005): Conversation with Robert Sullivan