Hide Description- Show Description+
1998
Winner of the 1999 NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry
Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars is the remarkable debut collection from one of the most startling and original young poets in New Zealand today. Kate Camp’s poems are constantly alive to wider social and political contexts, even – or especially – when they are at their most strongly personal. She can be at once playful and intensely serious: her words move effortlessly between the inspired and the everyday, and there is electricity in the spaces in between.
Kate Camp was born in 1972 and lives in Wellington. She is a poet, prose writer and reviewer. Her first collection of poetry, Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars, won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry at the 1999 The Montana NZ Book Awards. Her fourth book, The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls, won the 2011 NZ Post Book Awards Best Book of Poetry, and in 2011 Camp held the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer Residency. During this time she wrote Snow White’s Coffin, which was a finalist in the poetry category of the 2013 NZ Post Book Awards. Camp presents a monthly interview on Kim Hill’s Saturday Morning, ‘Kate’s Klassics’. She is the recipient of the 2017 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. The internet of things (2017) is her sixth poetry collection.
