New Zealand Writers
PRICE, Chris
Her poetry is best defined by its precision and grace.
PRICE, Chris (1962- ) is a poet, an editor and an educator. She teaches creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington.
Born in Reading, England, Price immigrated to Auckland in 1966. She attended the University of Auckland where she completed an MA in Languages and Literature with First Class Honours in 1986. Later, in 1998, she attended Victoria University of Wellington where she completed an MA in Creative Writing.
Chris Price has long been known for her contributions to literary life in New Zealand. She worked as an editor for Reed Publishing, from 1989 until 1993 when she became the editor of Landfall. Price successfully edited Landfall until 2000, co-editing her final issue, Landfall 2000, with Justin Paton.
From 1992-2004, Price was the coordinator of the hugely successful Writers and Readers programme in the New Zealand International Arts Festival.
In 1993, Price edited Bright Fine Gold: and other New Zealand Verse. (Reed)
In 2002, her first collection of poetry Husk was published. Guy Allen, in the NZ Herald writes 'with her first collection she establishes herself as a major and distinctive poetic talent. Love and lust, science and technology, language and literature – all get the same alluring treatment.'
Anna Jackson writes in the Waikato Times that 'this is poetry anyone wanting to be a poet might want to study to see how a master of the art leaps the gap – and makes it across with precision.'
From Husk the poem "Rose and fell" was chosen for the Best New Zealand Poems 2001.
Husk was the winner of the 2002 New Zealand Society of Authors Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry. The judges said of her writing "she makes us see things freshly and the way she deploys language makes us relish it as if we have only just discovered it."
In June 2004, Price took up a halftime lectureship in creative writing at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML). In 2005-06 she was one of ten writers who collaborated with New Zealand physicists to produce the anthology Are Angels OK? The parallel universes of New Zealand writers and scientists (Victoria University Press, 2006).
In 2006 she also released Brief Lives (Auckland University Press), an eccentric biographical dictionary that samples the lives of both real and fictional characters in a singular hybrid of fiction, anecdote, and essay. It was shortlisted for the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards in the biography category, and the judges remarked that ‘This beautifully crafted book was placed among the finalists because its short meditations on various lives, real and fictional, offer a lively and inventive reworking of the genre of biography. Few books so amenable to being dipped into are also capable of provoking so much thought and introspection. Price's poetic prose is a major factor in luring the reader into engaging with all aspects of the lives described in ways that intrigue and enlighten.' (Judges report, Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007)
David Larsen described Brief Lives as ‘a delightful read. It’s conversational. It’s playful. As an invitation to construct lives around shards of paleo-biographical evidence, to think interesting thoughts, it’s hard to resist.’ (NZ Listener, 2-8 September 2006)
In 2008 Chris Price was Auckland University Writer in Residence at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. From 2009 she will teach full-time at the IIML.
LK (modified SH)
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