Sir Vincent Gerard O'SullivanKNZM (28 September 1937 – 28 April 2024) was a New Zealand poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, critic, editor, biographer, librettist, and academic. From 1988 to 2004 he was a professor of English literature at Victoria University of Wellington, and in 2013 he was appointed the New Zealand Poet Laureate.
O'Sullivan's first marriage was to Tui Rererangi Walsh, with whom he had two children; Deirdre and Dominic O'Sullivan.[7][8] They separated in the 1970s.[9] He subsequently lived in Port Chalmers, Dunedin, with his wife Helen.[10]
O'Sullivan died in Dunedin on 28 April 2024, at the age of 86.[8] On his death, Fiona Kidman said that he was "right up there at the top" of great New Zealand writers, and someone who "helped to shape New Zealand literature" in its early years.[11]
O'Sullivan's literary works include plays, novels and collections of short stories and poetry. His works often addressed themes of death, loss and betrayal.[11] His first poetry collection was published in 1965 and he established his reputation as a poet in the late 1960s and 1970s.[12][5] He went on to complete twenty further volumes of poetry over the course of his career; his final collection, Still Is, is scheduled to be published posthumously in June 2024.[14]
In the late 1970s O'Sullivan began writing short stories and plays, with his first full-length stage play performed at the Downstage Theatre in 1983 during his residency. Titled Shuriken, it dealt with the 1943 Featherston prisoner of war camp incident.[11][12] He published seven collections of short stories and three novels;[14] his first full-length novel, Let the River Stand, was published in 1993.[12]
He was the editor of a number of notable anthologies, including An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry (first published 1970, subsequent editions 1976 and 1987);[5] scholar MacDonald P. Jackson describes it as having been "a standard text for a quarter of a century".[15] Through his academic career O'Sullivan became known as a scholar of Katherine Mansfield; he was the co-editor of the five-volume Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1984–2008) with Margaret Scott, and editor of Poems of Katherine Mansfield (1988) and Selected Letters (1989).[12][5] He was a founding trustee and in later years co-patron of the Randell Cottage Writers' Trust, which runs a writers' residency.[14]
In 2007, in honour of his 70th birthday, a festschrift was published celebrating O'Sullivan's work over his career, titled Still Shines When You Think of It (edited by Bill Manhire and Peter Whiteford).[14]
O'Sullivan has won the top prize for poetry at the New Zealand Book Awards on three occasions; for the collections Seeing You Asked in 1999, Nice Morning For It, Adam in 2005, and Us, Then in 2014.[12] His first novel Let the River Stand received the top prize for fiction in 1993, and his second novel was runner-up for this prize in 1999.[12] He also received the top prize for general non-fiction in 2021 for The Dark is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere a Biographical Portrait.[17]
In the 2000 Queen's Birthday Honours, O'Sullivan was appointed a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.[18] In 2009, following the restoration of titular honours by the New Zealand government, he initially declined redesignation as a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit,[19] because, in his view, it did not fit New Zealand "historically and socially", and that "it didn't seem to make much sense in contemporary New Zealand society".[20] However, he accepted the change in December 2021.[21]
In 2006 O'Sullivan received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement, worth $60,000, in recognition of his significant contribution to New Zealand poetry. Prime Minister Helen Clark said his poetry "goes to the heart of life's big themes – love, politics, philosophy, literature and history".[12][22] O'Sullivan was awarded the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer's Fellowship in 2004.[23] In 2008 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Auckland.[12] He was the New Zealand Poet Laureate for the term 2013 to 2015,[24][25] and in 2016 he was the Honoured New Zealand Writer at the Auckland Writers Festival.[26] He was also a Fellow of the Academy of New Zealand Literature.[27]
All This by Chance reviewed by Lesley McIntosh on The Reader, NZ Booksellers blog, 19 April 2018[97]
"Acclaimed writers Vincent O'Sullivan and Diana Wichtel explore their very different approaches to representing the Holocaust', Radio New Zealand, 26 December 2018[98]
"The Confession Box: Vincent O'Sullivan", The New Zealand Herald, 11 May 2019[99]
^O'Sullivan, Vincent (1992). Selected poems. Auckland ; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN019558242X. Archived from the original on 29 April 2024. Retrieved 28 April 2024.
^Cullinane, Majella (2020). The colours of that place: setting and memory in Irish short fiction (Doctoral thesis). OUR Archive, University of Otago. hdl:10523/9888.
^O'Sullivan, Vincent (2016). And so it is. Wellington: Victoria University Press. ISBN9781776560592.
^O'Sullivan, Vincent (1978). The boy, the bridge, the river. Dunedin: J. McIndoe. ISBN0589011898. OCLC5028977.
^O'Sullivan, Vincent (1981). Dandy Edison for Lunch and Other Stories. Dunedin: John McIndoe. ISBN0868680354.
^O'Sullivan, Vincent (1985). Survivals and other stories. Wellington: Port Nicholson Press. ISBN0868615463.
^O'Sullivan, Vincent. (1990). The snow in Spain : short stories. Wellington: Allen & Unwin. ISBN0046140115. OCLC22273782.
^O'Sullivan, Vincent. (1992). Palms and minarets : selected stories. Wellington: Victoria University Press. ISBN0864732309. OCLC26935434.
^O'Sullivan, Vincent (1 October 2014). The Families. Victoria University Press. ISBN978-0-86473-995-7. Archived from the original on 8 October 2023. Retrieved 25 June 2019.
^O'Sullivan, Vincent (1976). Miracle: A Romance. Dunedin: John McIndoe. ISBN0908565143.
^O'Sullivan, Vincent. (2013). Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand. Wellington: Steele Roberts Aotearoa. ISBN9781877577055. OCLC827970754.
^O'Sullivan, Vincent. (1976). James K. Baxter. Baxter, James K. Wellington: Oxford University Press. ISBN0195580109. OCLC3120442.
^O'Sullivan, Vincent. (2002). On longing. Jones, Lloyd, 1955-. Wellington: Four Winds Press. ISBN0958237514. OCLC59360352.
^O'Sullivan, Vincent (2011). Long journey to the border : a life of John Mulgan (Second ed.). Wellington, New Zealand. ISBN9781927131329. OCLC746765881.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^O'Sullivan, Vincent, ed. (1992). The Oxford book of New Zealand short stories. Auckland: Oxford University Press. ISBN0195582527. OCLC27762580.
^Milner, Ian (1993). O'Sullivan, Vincent (ed.). Intersecting lines : the memoirs of. Wellington: Victoria University Press. ISBN0864732511. OCLC34764456.
^Manhire, Bill; Whiteford, Peter, eds. (2007). Still Shines When You Think of It: A Festschrift for Vincent O'Sullivan. Wellington: Victoria University Press.
.jpg)
