Dinah Hawken
Dinah Hawken was born in Hawera, Taranaki, in 1943 and after many years of living in Wellington, with seven years in New York, now lives again on the west coast of New Zealand at Paekakariki. She has worked as a social worker, student counsellor and teacher of creative writing. Her first book of poetry, It Has No Sound and is Blue, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for ‘Best First Time Published Poet’ and three of her subsequent collections have been finalists in the New Zealand Book Awards. Her seventh book, Ocean and Stone, was published by Victoria University Press in September 2015. Dinah was the winner of the biennial Lauris Edmond Award for Distinguished Contribution to Poetry in New Zealand in 2007.
Hawken comments: ‘“The lake, the bloke and the bike” is a small sequence of poems written in Hauparu Bay, Lake Rotoiti. Place strongly affects my writing and this particular place, in the thermal region of New Zealand and on the edge of a beautiful lake, has had a powerful influence on me. Many of my poems have been written there and in fact my first serious poem bubbled up in the middle of one night thirty five years ago while staying by the lake.’
