Mark Pirie
Encyclopedia
Mark Pirie is a New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

 poet, writer, literary critic, anthologist, publisher, and editor. He is best known for his Generation X New Zealand anthology The NeXt Wave, which included an 8,000 word introduction (1998), the literary journals JAAM (Just Another Art Movement) and Broadsheet, a book cover photo series of tributes to famous rock albums, and the small press HeadworX Publishers in Wellington
Wellington
Wellington is the capital city and third most populous urban area of New Zealand, although it is likely to have surpassed Christchurch due to the exodus following the Canterbury Earthquake. It is at the southwestern tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Rimutaka Range...

, New Zealand. He has authored or edited more than 40 of his own books and published more than 50 books with HeadworX, including work by well known New Zealand poets Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Harry Ricketts, Alistair Paterson, Riemke Ensing, Tony Beyer, Harvey McQueen, Andrew Fagan
Andrew Fagan
Andrew Fagan is a prominent New Zealand writer, singer and songwriter. He was born in 1962 and grew up in Wellington. He gained fame in New Zealand in the 1980s as the lead singer of pop group The Mockers....

, Richard Von Sturmer and the Israeli author/painter/diplomat Moshé Liba.

Life

Born in Wellington, Pirie’s father was a diplomat and Pirie was educated first in America at a Jewish kindergarten in San Francisco (where his father was serving as a Consul-General), before moving back to New Zealand to attend Wadestown Primary School. He next attended Wellington College
Wellington College (New Zealand)
Wellington College is a state secondary school for boys in Mount Victoria in Wellington, New Zealand.-History:Wellington College opened in 1867 as Wellington Grammar School in Woodward Street, though Sir George Grey gave the school a deed of endowment in 1853. In 1874 it opened at its present...

 (1987–1991).

He has a BA (Hons) in English from Victoria University of Wellington
Victoria University of Wellington
Victoria University of Wellington was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a former constituent college of the University of New Zealand. It is particularly well known for its programmes in law, the humanities, and some scientific disciplines, but offers a broad range of other courses...

 and an MA from the University of Otago
University of Otago
The University of Otago in Dunedin is New Zealand's oldest university with over 22,000 students enrolled during 2010.The university has New Zealand's highest average research quality and in New Zealand is second only to the University of Auckland in the number of A rated academic researchers it...

. His thesis was on the New Zealand poet and editor Louis Johnson
Louis Johnson (poet)
-Life:He graduated from Wellington Teachers’ Training College.From 1968 to 1980, Johnson lived overseas and traveled widely, with an extended stay in Papua New Guinea....

.

He lives in Wellington and works as an editor for the Department of Internal Affairs.

Literary output

Pirie is a prolific author and publisher, with over 100 titles listed in the National Library of New Zealand
National Library of New Zealand
The National Library of New Zealand is New Zealand's legal deposit library charged with the obligation to "enrich the cultural and economic life of New Zealand and its interchanges with other nations"...

. Many are published under his own imprints HeadworX Publishers and The Night Press, Wellington or through the Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop in Paekakariki
Paekakariki
Paekakariki is a town in the Kapiti Coast District in the south-western North Island of New Zealand. It is 22 km north of Porirua and 45 km north-east of Wellington, the nation's capital city....

.

His critical writings focus on New Zealand poetry, covering mainly contemporary and some historical New Zealand writers.

He has published essays, interviews and reviews on numerous New Zealand writers including Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered Modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and...

, James Brown, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Hone Tuwhare
Hone Tuwhare
Hone Tuwhare was a noted New Zealand poet of Māori ancestry. He is closely associated with The Catlins in the Otago region of New Zealand, where he lived for the latter part of his life.-Early years:...

, James K. Baxter
James K. Baxter
James Keir Baxter was a poet, and is a celebrated figure in New Zealand society.-Biography:Baxter was born in Dunedin to Archibald Baxter and Millicent Brown and grew up near Brighton. He was named after James Keir Hardie, a founder of the British Labour Party. His father had been a conscientious...

, Barry Southam, Peter Olds, James Norcliffe, John O’Connor, Robert J. Pope, Harvey McQueen, Alan Brunton, Jenny Bornholdt, Kate Camp, Lauris Edmond, Gregory O’Brien, Geoff Cochrane, David Eggleton, Sam Hunt, Dinah Hawken, Mark Young, Bernard Gadd, Frank Pervan, Ursula Bethell, L E Scott, Andrew Fagan, Louis Johnson and musician Charlotte Yates.

Among the international authors he has written on or interviewed are Ee Tiang Hong (Malaysia/Australia), Richard Berengarten (UK), Edgard Telles Ribeiro (Brazil), Basim Furat (Iraq/New Zealand), Ken Bolton (Australia) and John Kinsella (Australia).

The literary journals he has edited are JAAM (1995–2005), an international journal based in Wellington, and Broadsheet: New Zealand Poetry (2008-), a magazine in chapbook form focusing on quality poetry and scholarly features on New Zealand poets as well as republishing an historical interview with the late American poet Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...

.

He has edited a major critical-historical book on Michael O’Leary, The Earl is in: 25 Years of the Earl of Seacliff (2009), as well as selected works by New Zealand poets F W Nielsen Wright
Niel Wright
Niel Wright is a New Zealand poet, literary critic, bibliographer, publisher, and cultural and political commentator. He is best known for his epic poem The Alexandrians, published in 120 books between 1961 and 2007 and totalling some 36,000 lines...

, Simon Williamson, Harry Ricketts and the Iraqi-New Zealand poet Basim Furat.

From 2003-2004 he was involved with organising the Wellington International Poetry Festival with Ron Riddell and Saray Torres. HeadworX published the first two anthologies of the festival.

Pirie's own published works include numerous collections or anthologies of poetry (one of them being a hand-made book The Bet: Poems in Memory of Jim Morrison - American Poet), a verse novel TOM (2009) and a collection of short stories, Swing and Other Stories (2002). His poetry was first featured by Alistair Paterson in Poetry NZ 16 (1998).

In 2003, his selected poems, Gallery, was commissioned by Australian poet John Kinsella and published by the international publishing house Salt Publishing
Salt Publishing
Salt Publishing is an independent publisher whose origins date back to 1990 when poet John Kinsella launched Salt Magazine in Western Australia. The journal rapidly developed an international reputation as a leading publisher of new poetry and poetics...

 in England.

In 2009, he co-edited with Tim Jones
Tim Jones (writer)
Tim Jones is a New Zealand writer and poet.Born in Cleethorpes, near Grimsby, England, Jones moved to Southland, New Zealand at a young age. He was educated at the University of Otago in Dunedin, and has lived in Wellington since 1993....

 the first anthology of New Zealand Science Fiction poetry, Voyagers (Interactive Press, Brisbane). The collection was listed in the Best 100 Books of 2009 in the New Zealand Listener
New Zealand Listener
The New Zealand Listener is a New Zealand magazine. First published in 1939 and edited by Oliver Duff and the Monte Holcroft it originally had a monopoly on the publication of of upcoming television and radio programmes. In the 1980s it lost its monopoly on the publication of upcoming television...

 and in August 2010 won a Sir Julius Vogel Award
Sir Julius Vogel Award
The Sir Julius Vogel Awards are awarded each year at the New Zealand National Science Fiction Convention to recognise achievement in New Zealand science fiction, fantasy, horror, and science fiction fandom...

 in the "Best Collected Work" category.

Since 2010 he has been involved in setting up and running the Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa with Michael O’Leary
Michael O'Leary (publisher and writer)
Michael O'Leary is a New Zealand publisher, poet, novelist, performer, artist and bookshop proprietor. He publishes under the imprint Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, which he founded in 1984. He now runs a bookshop, Kakariki Books, from the Paekakariki Railway Station. He also has an on-line book...

 and Niel Wright
Niel Wright
Niel Wright is a New Zealand poet, literary critic, bibliographer, publisher, and cultural and political commentator. He is best known for his epic poem The Alexandrians, published in 120 books between 1961 and 2007 and totalling some 36,000 lines...

.

Pirie's most recent work is the major cricket poetry anthology A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009, drawing on 145 years of New Zealand cricket poetry. The book contains a foreword by eminent cricket historian Don Neely
Don Neely
Donald Owen "Don" Neely MBE, MNZM is a New Zealand cricket historian, administrator and former player. He is a former President of New Zealand Cricket and has written or co-written over 30 books on New Zealand cricket....

and a cover painting by well-known English cricket painter Jocelyn Galsworthy.

[To be published September 2010]

External links

Mark Pirie's personal website http://markpirie.com/

New Zealand Book Council Profile http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/Writers/Profiles/Pirie,%20Mark

HeadworX Publishers web site http://headworx.eyesis.co.nz

Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa http://poetryarchivenz.wordpress.com

Mark Pirie's full bibliography http://markpirie.com/bibliography

For a complete listing of Mark Pirie’s works, see the online catalogue of the National Library of New Zealand http://www.natlib.govt.nz/
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK