New Zealand Writers

MILLAR, Paul

A leading expert on James K. Baxter

MILLAR, Paul is a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington who specialises in New Zealand and Pacific literature. He has published extensively in the field and is a leading expert on James K. Baxter.

In 2007 he is convening the judging panel for the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

Millar holds a BA (Hons) from Auckland University and a PhD from Victoria University. In 2001 he taught and conducted research at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa as an exchange professor and Fulbright scholar. In 2005 he worked with colleagues to introduce a new postgraduate qualification, the Master of Arts in New Zealand Literature. In 2007 he is at the University of Canterbury on a teaching exchange with Prof. Mark Williams where, for a change, he will also teach Australian literature and the Twentieth Century Novel.

Millar has produced five books and a number of articles on the poetry of James K. Baxter, including Spark to a Waiting Fuse and Baxter’s New Selected Poems. He co-wrote the Baxter documentary The Road to Jerusalem and, more recently, has been the Baxter consultant on two television documentaries produced by the Gibson Group. He co-edited the collection of scholarly essays East by South: China in the Australasian Imagination, and wrote 68 author and subject entries for the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, making him the volume’s third largest contributor. He is a founding board member of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, and was for some years a member of the board of the New Zealand Book Council, where he took responsibility for the development of the first generation of the Book Council web site.

In 2003 Millar was awarded the 2003 Copyright Licensing Limited Writer's Award to work on a biography of writer Bill Pearson, to be published by Auckland University Press. In 2004 he joined Anne French and Tony Simpson on the judging panel for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. His other projects include a collaborative study of James K. Baxter’s use of classical mythology and a co-edited volume of New Zealand literary biographies.

PG

LINKS
Paul Millar’s Staff Page at Victoria University of Wellington
Details of Millar’s publications