This event has been cancelled.
To read Brian Turner “is to enter a world where natural things stand starkly, and emotions are felt as directly as the rock and streams and mountains to which he constantly returns,” says fellow poet and 2016 Festival Honoured Writer Vincent O’Sullivan.
Otago lyric poet and keen environmentalist Turner is a man of physical and literary talents: a rabbiter, fisherman, cricketer, cyclist, mountaineer, and former international hockey representative, as well as an award-winning writer of twelve poetry collections, and memoir, sports biographies (rugby All Black greats Meads, Kronfeld and Oliver, and three volumes on the cricketing career of his younger brother Glenn Turner), essays, reviews, scripts and more.
He won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize with his first collection Ladders of Rain and has gone on to further accolades: Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University; the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry; the 2005 Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate; a Montana Book Award for Poetry. His 2015 Boundaries celebrated the places and people of Central Otago where he lives in Oturehua, a small settlement of about 40 people; and Into the Wider World: A Back Country Miscellany, written with references to long-term outdoorsmen friends and their adventures in remote, often wild places.
To close the 2020 Festival Turner joins John Campbell on stage in a free celebratory session of his life and work.
$2 per hour to a max of $12 on weekends and a $12 flat rate for weekday evenings at The Civic car park. Find out more.