New Zealand Writers

HALL, Bernadette

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Friendship, love (religious and secular) and the process of writing are recurrent preoccupations in her work.

Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). [About the Companion entries]

HALL, Bernadette (1945– ), poet and playwright, was born in Central Otago and has an MA in Classics from University of Otago. She was the 1996 Burns Fellow at Otago University.

Like a number of New Zealand women writers, she did not begin to publish until her 40s. Her first collection of poems, Heartwood (1989), was described by Ken Arvidson as ‘the work of a poet of very individual sensibility’. Three subsequent collections, Of Elephants etc (1990), The Persistent Levitator (1994) and Still Talking (1997), have cemented her reputation as one of the more distinctive poetic voices to have emerged since the late 1980s. Friendship, love (religious and secular) and the process of writing are recurrent preoccupations in her work, which is characterised by a crisp, often cryptic, lyricism, combined with a visionary intensity. The Persistent Levitator was shortlisted for the Poetry Section of the New Zealand Book Awards in 1995. She has also written two plays, The Clothesline (1991) and Glad and the Angels (1994), and a musical, Questing (1995).

Updated Information

In 1997 Bernadette Hall was a participant for three months in the International Writers Community in Iowa, USA.

Hall is based in North Canterbury and in 2002 co-edited Big Sky, an anthology of Canterbury poems published by Shoal Bay Press.

Her fifth poetry collection, Settler Dreaming (VUP, 2001), was one of three books shortlisted for the Tasmania Pacific Region Poetry Prize, and was highly praised by critics. ‘...a beautiful book’ —Anna Jackson, Waikato Times.

Settler Dreaming was also nominated for Best Use of Illustration in the 2002 Spectrum Print Book Design Awards for the illustration and design by Hall's friend and collaborator, Dunedin artist Kathryn Madill.

Hall left teaching at the end of 2004 to concentrate on her writing.

In December 2004 Bernadette Hall visited Antarctica on an Artists in Antarctica Fellowship, which she shared with Kathryn Madill.

The Merino Princess: Selected Poems (VUP, 2004) brings together the best of Hall's five previous poetry collections. David Eggleton wrote of it in The New Zealand Listener (Feb. 19-25 2005): 'Searching for epiphanies and sometimes finding them, Hall sails up like the Flying Nun, a 'persistent levitator' buoyed by her own lightness of being and her linguistic felicity.'

Hall edited Like Love Poems (VUP, 2006), selected mostly unpublished work by the Wanganui painter and poet, Joanna Margaret Paul. The book was included in the Listener’s list of Best Books of 2006: ‘We owe an immense debt of gratitude to Victoria University Press and, in particular, Bernadette Hall for bringing us this beautifully produced, fastidiously and intelligently edited collection.’(Hugh Roberts, NZ Listener, 24 June 2006)

Also in 2006, Hall produced a collection of poems to accompany the Stations of the Cross sculpted by Llew Summers in the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Christchurch.  The Way of the Cross ( Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament Charitable Trust, 2006) 

Hall’s work has been published in a wide range of national and international anthologies. Most recently her poems have appeared in Shards of Silver (Steele Roberts 2007); Great Sporting Moments ( ed Damien Wilkins, VUP, 2005);  the earth’s deep breathing: garden poems by New Zealand poets (ed. Harvey Mcqueen, Godwit, 2007);  Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance (ed. Jack Ross and Jan Kemp, AUP, 2007).

An essay on the art of Kathryn Madill was included in Look This Way: New Zealand writers on New Zealand artists  (ed Sally Blundell, AUP, 2007)

Poems included in Best New Zealand Poems 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007.
2001 The Lay Sister
2005 The History of Europe
2006 The White Dress
2007 Under Erebus

Hall was the 2006 Victoria University Writer in Residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters. The resulting publication was The Ponies (VUP, 2007.) The Ponies was included in the Listener’s Best Books of 2007. ‘This collection is profound and beautiful, not least because (the poems) speak gratefully of the integrity and restorative possibilities of the poet’s craft.’(Isabel Haarhaus, New Zealand Herald)  

In 2007 Hall held the six-month writers' residency at Rathcoola Residency in Donoughmore, Co. Cork, Ireland.

In 2008 Hall, along with Fiona Farrell, is an inaugural tutor at The Hagley Writers’ Institute, Christchurch.

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