TIM UPPERTON

Author of ‘Kill List’

Tim Upperton’s second poetry collection is The Night We Ate the Baby (HauNui Press, 2014). His poems have been published widely in literary magazines in New Zealand and overseas and are anthologised in The Best of Best New Zealand Poems (Victoria University Press), Essential New Zealand Poems (Random House), Villanelles (Everyman), and Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century (Dartmouth University Press). He teaches creative writing at Massey University, Palmerston North. Tim has four children, who are his harshest critics. He wrote a poem about them once called Four Bananas.

‘When I was younger I loved books about islands. Enid Blyton’s first Famous Five book, Five on a Treasure Island, was my favourite. I loved R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, which was written over a hundred years before I was born and which I might find unreadable now. It’s the story of three upper-crust British boys – Jack, Ralph, and Peterkin – shipwrecked on a desert island in the South Pacific. I also enjoyed Tom Neale’s An Island to Oneself and Gerald Durrell’s memoir about his childhood on the Greek island of Corfu, My Family and Other Animals. The idea of living alone on an island appealed to me very much – perhaps because I was one of eight children and a bit of solitude would’ve been a nice change.’

Tim’s blog includes odd bits and pieces, poems, and reviews. You can read it here: http://www.aspurredword.com/