An Evening with Vivienne Plumb

Award Winning Writer of Poetry, Drama and Fiction. 2018 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writing Resident.

Vivienne Plumb recently held the 2018 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writing Residency, and lived in Berlin for almost a year while researching and working on her new creative nonfiction book.

She is based in Wellington and writes poetry, drama and fiction. She has published twenty books in these three fields of writing.

She has held many writing residences, including the 2016 University of Auckland/Michael King Writing Residency and a University of Iowa residency; and has been the recipient of many awards including the Bruce Mason Playwrighting Award, the Hubert Church First Best Book Award, the Sargeson Fellowship, and an Australian post-graduate scholarship. She has acted as a judge for numerous poetry competitions and for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Her plays have been produced all over New Zealand and translated and published in Poland and Italy. She is a member of the Academy of New Zealand Literature.

Her most recent book, a compilation of her past-published readers’ favourites, As Much Gold as an Ass Could Carry, has been translated into Italian and published in Italy. Vivienne's North Island reading tour is supported by the New Zealand Book Council.

Some quotes from reviews of Vivienne Plumb’s writing:
"Plumb has a particular facility for a kind of intensely sensuous description that almost overwhelms." - Hugh Roberts, NZ Listener

"Plumb's writing tweaks the jackets of hardline assumptions, it is a celebration of something anarchic, in the realm of mythic tricksters." - Vincent O’Sullivan

"A dazzlingly good piece of writing – it’s funny, mischievous, satirical and genuinely moving." - Bill Manhire

"I was riveted by Plumb’s writing…" - NZ Herald

"Austenesque…" - Otago Daily Times

"An original voice…" - Waikato Times

"Page by page, a bloody good read." - New Zealand Books

"Plumb makes marvelous swoops from the mundane to the mystical." - Dominion Post

"…subtle and elusive, stylish poetic writing. Her play creates an atomised free-floating space in which fragments of everyday life are given a strange luminosity." - Paul Simei-Barton, NZ Herald