David Howard, Auckland, New Zealand, 2018
In 1959, the year of David Howard's birth, Christchurch was a provincial capital that thought it was still a part of Victorian England and continued to honour the British Empire. When he was a child the city rejected the gifting of a Henry Moore sculpture; as a teenager, in the 1970s, he saw public protests at the touring of work by Diane Arbus. A determination to overcome the distressed regionalism of such public responses has guided his career. As both an editor and a writer he has a strong interest in the ability of language to modify external, shared reality.
In 1989 David co-founded (with the fiction writer Sandra Arnold) the literary quarterly Takahe; in 1990 he co-founded the Canterbury Poets Collective. Both have become literary institutions. David has edited and published collections by David Gregory (Push, 2008) and Nick Williamson (The Blue Outboard, 2016) through Black Doris Press; researched and edited the scholarly A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie (OUP, 2015), which was cited by both Murray Edmond and Peter Simpson as an outstanding book of the year; and more recently co-edited (with Orchid Tierney) a series of commentaries on New Zealand literature for Jacket2 (University of Pennsylvania). He understands both the symbiotic relationship and the tension between poetry, publishing, and scholarship.
As a poet David has published several collections, including Rāwaho: The Completed Poems (Cold Hub Press, 2022), which was 44 years in the making. Poems from his last four volumes have appeared in Best New Zealand Poems. David has performed in Nicaragua with the support of the NZ Book Council; received the New Zealand Mid-Career Writers Award and the University of South Pacific Poetry Prize; held the Robert Burns Fellowship, the Otago Wallace Residency, the Ursula Bethell Residency, the Writers House Residency in Pazin Croatia, and enjoyed UNESCO City of Literature residencies in Prague Czech Republic (2016) and Ulyanovsk Russia (2019). He has collaborated with visual artists such as the photographer Fiona Pardington and the painter Kim Pieters; contributed to Art New Zealand; provided libretti for the composers Sofia Filyanima (Russia), Brina Jez (Slovenia), Marta Jirackova (Czech Republic), and Johanna Selleck (Australia). David's intellectual restlessness protects him from mistaking the fashionable for the significant.
David is a professional pyrotechnician who has worked as SFX supervisor for acts such as Janet Jackson and Metallica.
Awards & Grants
UNESCO City of Literature Residency, Ulyanovsk (2019)
Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship, Auckland (2018)
The Robert Lord Writers’ Cottage Residency, Dunedin (2018)
The Writers’ House Residency, Pazin Croatia (2017)
Ursula Bethell Residency, University of Canterbury (2016)
UNESCO City of Literature Residency, Prague (2016)
Otago Wallace Residency, Pah Homestead, Auckland (2014)
The Robert Burns Fellowship, University of Otago (2013)
Co-winner, University of the South Pacific Poetry Prize (2010)
New Zealand Society of Authors Mid-Career Writer’s Award (2009)
Finalist, Davoren Hanna Poetry Competition, Ireland (2001)
Creative New Zealand Project Grant (1993, 2003, 2020)
1st Prize NZ Poetry Society International Competition (1988)
1st Prize Gordon & Gotch Poetry Award (1984)