Sir Vincent Gerard O'Sullivan (28 September 1937 – 28 April 2024) was a New Zealand poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, critic, editor, biographer, librettist, and academic. From 1988 to 2004 he was a professor of English literature at Victoria University of Wellington, and in 2013 he was appointed the New Zealand Poet Laureate.

Background

Born in Auckland in 1937, O'Sullivan was the youngest of six children born to Timothy O'Sullivan (born in Tralee, Ireland) and Myra O'Sullivan (née McKean). He was educated at St Joseph's School in Grey Lynn, and Sacred Heart College, located in Ponsonby when he was there. He graduated from the University of Auckland with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959 and a Master of Arts with first-class honours the following year. He was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship, and completed a Master of Letters (MLitt) degree at Lincoln College, Oxford in 1962. O'Sullivan's first marriage was to Tui Rererangi Walsh, with whom he had two children; Deirdre and Dominic O'Sullivan. They separated in the 1970s. He subsequently lived in Port Chalmers, Dunedin, with his wife Helen. O'Sullivan died in Dunedin on 28 April 2024, at the age of 86. On his death, Fiona Kidman said that he was "right up there at the top" of great New Zealand writers, and someone who "helped to shape New Zealand literature" in its early years.

Career

O'Sullivan lectured at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) from 1963 to 1966, and the University of Waikato between 1968 and 1978. He served as literary editor of the NZ Listener from 1979 to 1980, and then between 1981 and 1987 won a series of writer's residencies and research fellowships in universities in Australia and New Zealand: VUW, University of Tasmania, Deakin University (Geelong), Flinders University in Adelaide, University of Western Australia, and University of Queensland. These were interrupted in 1983 by a year as resident playwright at Downstage Theatre, Wellington. In 1988 he returned to VUW, where he was professor of English literature until his retirement in 2004. His notable students included Majella Cullinane. O'Sullivan's literary works include plays, novels and collections of short stories and poetry. His works often addressed themes of death, loss and betrayal. His first poetry collection was published in 1965 and he established his reputation as a poet in the late 1960s and 1970s. He went on to complete twenty further volumes of poetry over the course of his career; his final collection, Still Is, is scheduled to be published posthumously in June 2024. In the late 1970s O'Sullivan began writing short stories and plays, with his first full-length stage play performed at the Downstage Theatre in 1983 during his residency. Titled Shuriken, it dealt with the 1943 Featherston prisoner of war camp incident. He published seven collections of short stories and three novels; his first full-length novel, Let the River Stand, was published in 1993. He was the editor of a number of notable anthologies, including An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry (first published 1970, subsequent editions 1976 and 1987); scholar MacDonald P. Jackson describes it as having been "a standard text for a quarter of a century". Through his academic career O'Sullivan became known as a scholar of Katherine Mansfield; he was the co-editor of the five-volume Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (1984–2008) with Margaret Scott, and editor of Poems of Katherine Mansfield (1988) and Selected Letters (1989). He was a founding trustee and in later years co-patron of the Randell Cottage Writers' Trust, which runs a writers' residency. In 2007, in honour of his 70th birthday, a festschrift was published celebrating O'Sullivan's work over his career, titled Still Shines When You Think of It (edited by Bill Manhire and Peter Whiteford).

Honours and awards

In 1966, O'Sullivan won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry, in 1979 he received the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award for a short story, and in 1994 he received the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship. O'Sullivan has won the top prize for poetry at the New Zealand Book Awards on three occasions; for the collections Seeing You Asked in 1999, Nice Morning For It, Adam in 2005, and Us, Then in 2014. His first novel Let the River Stand received the top prize for fiction in 1993, and his second novel was runner-up for this prize in 1999. He also received the top prize for general non-fiction in 2021 for The Dark is Light Enough: Ralph Hotere a Biographical Portrait. In the 2000 Queen's Birthday Honours, O'Sullivan was appointed a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature. In 2009, following the restoration of titular honours by the New Zealand government, he initially declined redesignation as a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, because, in his view, it did not fit New Zealand "historically and socially", and that "it didn't seem to make much sense in contemporary New Zealand society". However, he accepted the change in December 2021. In 2006 O'Sullivan received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement, worth $60,000, in recognition of his significant contribution to New Zealand poetry. Prime Minister Helen Clark said his poetry "goes to the heart of life's big themes – love, politics, philosophy, literature and history". O'Sullivan was awarded the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer's Fellowship in 2004. In 2008 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Auckland. He was the New Zealand Poet Laureate for the term 2013 to 2015, and in 2016 he was the Honoured New Zealand Writer at the Auckland Writers Festival. He was also a Fellow of the Academy of New Zealand Literature.

Works

Poetry

Short stories

Novels

Plays

Non-fiction

Edited works

Librettos

Festschrift

News coverage