Tuwhare, Hone 1922-2008

views updated

Tuwhare, Hone 1922-2008

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born October 21, 1922, in Kaikohe, Northland, New Zealand; died January 16, 2008, in Dunedin, New Zealand. Poet. Tuwhare came late to the literary art, when he was in his forties, yet he was the first Maori to publish his poetry in English and to win the critical acclaim of English-speaking critics. He won several awards in his native land and was named Te Mata poet laureate of New Zealand in 1999. Tuwhare's first collection, No Ordinary Sun (1964), enabled him to express his horror at the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, the aftermath of which he witnessed as a soldier of the New Zealand Army stationed in Japan after the war. In the 1970s Tuwhare looked closer to home and took up the cause of the Maori people. He engaged in the cultural and political affairs of the Maori and promoted the work of his colleagues as an organizer of the Maori Writers and Artists Conference in 1973. He gave frequent readings of his poetry, which was, according to some reports, at its best when read aloud; critics took special note of the conversational quality of his work and the familiarity of his idiom to his fellow New Zealanders. Later in life Tuwhare was able to indulge a scholarly interest in Maori history and language at the University of Otago, first as a Robert Burns centennial fellow and then as a Hocken Library research fellow; later he was a literary fellow at the University of Auckland in 1991. Tuwhare's poetry appeared in at least a dozen collections (some of which included a few of his prose works or short stores as well). The collections include Short Back and Sideways: Poems and Prose (1992), Deep River Talk: Collected Poems (1994), Piggy-Back Moon (2001), and Oooooo…… !!! (2005).