Sue Wootton, award-winning poet and fiction writer
Dunedin Writer Spotlight: Sue Wootton
Posted: Sunday Apr 26, 2015
Sue Wootton is an award-winning poet and fiction writer whose work has been widely published and anthologized.
Her fiction and poetry is widely published in New Zealand and internationally. Some of her work has been translated into Hungarian, Romanian, Spanish and Vietnamese.
Sue wrote 4 poems for “Lan Yuan – A Garden of Distant Longing” a book about Dunedin’s Chinese Garden (2013).
Sue's collection of 3 short stories, The Happiest Music on Earth, was published as an eBook in December 2012.
Sue's four collections of poetry are Hourglass (2005), Magnetic South (2008), By Birdlight (2011) and Out of Shape (2014).
In 2008 her story Virtuoso won a place in the prestigious NZ Book Month anthology, Six Pack 3.
As well as writing for adults, Sue also writes poetry and stories for children. Her children's book, Cloudcatcher, was published in 2010.
Her poem Countdown appears in Best New Zealand Poems 2004.
Winner 2013 Victorian Cancer Council Arts Award for poetry
‘Daffodils’ is a formally elegant poem in which subtle slant rhyme, extended metaphor and thoughtful pacing entice the reader emotionally into the poem. When reading this poem, one embraces the solitude, renewal and resilience of human experience more widely than before. An outstanding entry, this poem is full of delicate wisdom. Although Wordsworth is not explicitly referenced I like the way this poem resonates with the history of poetry, with the recurring, seasonal ‘daffodil’ in poetry, especially with Wordsworth’s ‘host of golden daffodils’.
— Jennifer Harrison, Judge