Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry

The Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry is an initiative of the Canterbury Poets Collective and the New Zealand Poetry Society. The award is for excellence in, and substantial contribution to, New Zealand poetry.

It is presented biennially at the Five New Zealand Poets reading at Applaud (Christchurch Arts Festival).

The inaugural recipient is Wellington poet and editor, the late Bill Sewell.

From a talk for National Radio's Bookmarks by John O'Connor:

"It's a cliche, perhaps, to think of poets as undervalued in their own time and later coming to prominence. Yet to an extent it's applicable to Bill Sewell, for while he was certainly respected — as evidenced by his Burns Fellowships— it remains true that his work was not represented in any major anthology of New Zealand poetry until quite recently. During a period when poets often came to national attention on the back of political correctness, youth culture or writing-course publicity, Bill Sewell kept on writing his poems and developing his craft in relative obscurity— he had only his excellence to recommend him.

Now that he's gone we're beginning to acknowledge what we previously felt: that Bill Sewell is one of our finest poets, that his last two books in particular — Erebus: a poem and The Ballad of Fifty-one— stand with the best work of such major figures as Alistair Campbell, Kendrick Smithyman and Lauris Edmond. Like some of them, he is also at his best on a broader canvas, his individual pieces gaining significance within the interactions of their presentation. In another sense too his poems are contextual — they are part of our national story.

The presentation of the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry to the late Bill Sewell is in recognition of that achievement.