Fleur Adcock

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Fleur Adcock (born 10 February 1934) is a New Zealand poet and editor of English and Northern Irish originstry who has lived a large part of her life in England.

Early life

Adcock, the older of two sisters, was born in Papakura to Cyril John Adcock and Irene Robinson Adcock. Kareen Fleur Adcock's birth name was originally Fleur Adcock, but she was known as Fleur and legally changed her name to Fleur Adcock in 1982. She lived in England for eight years (1939–1947).

Adcock studied Classics at Victoria University of Wellington, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1954 and a Masters of Arts in 1956.

Personal life

Adcock was married to two well-known New Zealand literary personalities. Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (divorced 1958), married Barry Crump, divorcing in 1963, and she married Barry Crump in August 1952. Gregory and Andrew, her first husband, have two sons.

Irene Adcock, Adcock's mother, is also a writer, and Marilyn Duckworth, her sister, is a novelist.

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Career

Adcock served as an assistant lecturer in classics and librarian at the University of Otago from 1958 to 1962, as well as as a librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington between 1962 and 1963.

In 1963, she returned to England and took up a post as a librarian at London's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. At this point, she had already had poems published in a few literary journals in New Zealand. In 1964, her first collection of poetry, The Eye of the Hurricane, was published in New Zealand, and Tigers, 1967, was her first collection published in the United Kingdom.

Adcock returned to New Zealand for the first time since she had left for London, and after returning to London in 1976, she became a full-time writer. She served as the Arts Council Creative Writing Fellow at the Charlotte Mason College of Education in Windermere from 1977 to 1978, and the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship at the universities of Newcastle and Durham from 1979 to 1981.

Adcock has worked as a freelance writer, residing in East Finchley, north London, as a translator and poetry commentator for the BBC since 1980.

Adcock's poetry is often concerned with themes of place, human beings, and daily life, but more often with a dark twist to the mundane events she writes about. Her early work was influenced by her experience as a classicist, but her new work is looser in structure and more concerned with the unconscious mind. She poems are often written from the perspective of an outsider or a split sense of identity inherited from her own emigrant experience and alienation from New Zealand's family.

Adcock received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006 for her collected works, Poems 1960–2000. She was only the seventh female poet to be honoured with the award in its 73 years.

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Awards and honours

• 1961: Festival of Wellington Poetry Award
• 1964: New Zealand State Literary Fund Award
• 1968: Buckland Award (New Zealand)
• 1968: Jessie Mackay Prize (New Zealand)
• 1972: Jessie Mackay Prize (New Zealand)
• 1976: Cholmondeley Award (United Kingdom)
• 1979: Buckland Award (New Zealand)
• 1984: New Zealand National Book Award for Selected Poems (1983)
• 1984: Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• 1988: Arts Council Writers' Award (United Kingdom)
• 1996: Officer of the Order of the British Empire, for services to literature, in the 1996 New Year Honours
• 2006: Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (United Kingdom) for Poems 1960–2000
• 2007: Honorary Doctor of Literature from Victoria University of Wellington
• 2008: Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature, in the 2008 Queen's Birthday Honours