New Zealand Writers

FELL, Cliff

a distinctive voice that is confident, wistful, tender, mocking, knowing and curious all at once

FELL, Cliff (1955- ) is a poet and book reviewer.

Cliff Fell was born in Hatch End, London in 1955, to a New Zealand father and an English mother. Before settling in New Zealand in 1998 Fell travelled widely, living and working in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He had a number of different jobs, including time spent as an archaeologist, film-maker, bank-clerk, bartender, roadie, bookseller, truck-driver, teacher and musician. He now works as a tutor at the School of Arts at NMIT in Nelson.

Cliff Fell's poems have been published in the United Kingdom and New Zealand in magazines, chapbooks and anthologies, including The New Exeter Book of Riddles (Enitharmon, London, 1999) and the online journal Turbine. His poem ‘Ophelia’ was selected for Best New Zealand Poems 2003. 'Motueka Song', a radio-poem about the Motueka River was broadcast on National Radio.

In 2002 Fell graduated with an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University. He was the first poet to win the Adam Prize. His first collection, The Adulterer's Bible was published by Victoria University Press in 2003. In 2004 the book was a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

The title of The Adulterer’s Bible is taken from the notorious 1631 edition of the King James Bible in which the printer omitted the word ‘not’ from the seventh commandment. The book contains a number of interwoven narratives of adultery. In The Listener Peter Bland wrote that the collection is ‘amusing and inventive…rich sensual detail’ and called it ‘a fine first book’ that ‘signals both an interest in the accidental mysteries of language and a taste for the erotic’.

Cliff Fell lives in Moteuka with his partner Pammy and his daughter Nina.

Fell participates in the Book Council’s Writers in Schools programme.

(LK)

Upated Information

The Adulterer's Bible received the New Zealand Society of Authors Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004.

Beauty of the Badlands (Victoria University Press, 2008) is a book of poetry set in mid-west America.