Anne Kennedy

Anne Kennedy (born 1959 Wellington, New Zealand) is a New Zealand novelist, poet, and filmwriter.

Background Educated in Wellington, Kennedy was a piano teacher and music librarian in her early years. She graduated with a Bachelor of Music in Composition from Victoria University of Wellington and taught at Trinity College London. In 2007 she completed a Master of Arts at Victoria University of Wellington, under the supervision of Lydia Wevers, titled Kicking round home: Atonality in the Bone People.

Career Since 1986, she has been a freelance scriptwriter. Anne Kennedy published her first novel in 1988, and has since published six novels and books of poetry. Her most recent novel, The Last Days of the National Costume, was featured on the Listener's Top 100 Books of 2013, and on the Nielson 2013 Bestseller's list in New Zealand adult fiction.

In 2006, Kennedy was a visiting writer at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. and co-edited the 2005 Best New Zealand Poems series.

Her work has appeared in Landfall, Sport, NZ Listener, Southerly (Australia), and JAAM, and she has co-edited several other works including the 2005 Best New Zealand Poems series.

In 2021 she received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry.

Awards

1985 Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award 1995 University of Auckland Literary Fellow 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards - Poetry category winner 2014 Fellowship for University of Auckland Residency at the Michael King Writers Centre 2014 Nigel Cox Unity Books Award 2021 Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement

Works Poetry The Sea Walks into a Wall, 2021 Moth Hour, Auckland University Press, 2019 "What Fell"; "Towards Fourteen Ways of Looking at Pohutukawa"; "Berlin", Poetry New Zealand "I am", Scottish Poetry Library

Novels

Screenwriting The Monkey's Mask Crush

Essay The Source of the Song (ed. Mark Williams, 1995)

Anthologies

1st edition 1992