Hone Tuwhare died on 16 January in Dunedin. He was writing up to the day he died. He was a great New Zealand poet, spendidly independent of poetic schools, sects, factions, cabals and fashions. His inimitable voice will be sadly missed.
I didn’t intend this blog to be a memento mori, but with the passing of Bernard Gadd, Meg Campbell, and now Hone Tuwhare, such it is turning out to be.
Bernard Gadd died earlier in December. I’m late posting this news, and there are excellent memorials to Bernard on Harvey Molloy’s blog and on Helen Rickerby’s blog.
I never met Bernard, but read and enjoyed a number of his poems, was impressed by his steadfast commitment to a multicultural Aotearoa/New Zealand, and owe him a debt of gratitude for selecting stories of mine for two anthologies he edited: “Statesman” in a Longman Paul anthology for schools, I Have Seen the Future, and subsequently “My Friend the Volcano”, in the first volume of the Other Voicesseries produced by his publishing house, Hallard Press. These were the first two stories I had published professionally.
He and Trevor Reeves were among the first New Zealand publishers and anthologists to see that speculative fiction – science fiction, fantasy and horror – was part of the New Zealand literary scene, rather than being separate from it, and to include it in literary journals and anthologies.
Thank you, Bernard.