Robert Sullivan

His books have a postmodern quality and "explore social and racial subjects, and aspects of Māori tradition and history." He is "widely seen as one of the most important contemporary Māori poets." He is the current New Zealand Poet Laureate following his appointment for a three year term from August 2025.

• Name — Robert Sullivan • Order — 14th • Office — New Zealand Poet Laureate • Term Start — 22 August 2025 • Predecessor — Chris Tse • Birth Name — Robert Brenton Massey Sullivan • Born — 1967 • Birthplace — Auckland, New Zealand • Occupation — * Poet • academic • editor

Sullivan is of Māori and Irish descent. His grandfather was an immigrant to New Zealand from Galway. He identifies with the Ngā Puhi (Ngāti Manu/Ngāti Hau) and Kāi Tahu iwi, and describes himself as multicultural. Sullivan was raised in Auckland and attended Auckland Grammar. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and Māori studies and a Master of Arts with Honours, supervised by Albert Wendt, from the University of Auckland. He also has a diploma in library and information studies from Victoria University of Wellington and a diploma in teaching from the University of Waikato. He began teaching at the University of Hawaiʻi in 2003 and received a teaching award in 2008 for his work as associate professor of English. He also held the position of Director of Creative Writing at the University of Hawaiʻi. At the Manukau Institute of Technology, Sullivan led the creative writing programme and served as Deputy Chief Executive (Māori). He graduated 2015 from the University of Auckland with a PhD thesis on charting "diverse indigenous worlds in the published poetry of five first and second wave Pacific writers," supervised by Selina Tusitala Marsh.

Sullivan's wide-ranging work explores dimensions of Māori tradition as well as "contemporary urban experiences, including local racial and social concerns". His writing has a post modern feel and shows acute awareness of important Aotearoa/New Zealand issues while linking them in a complex way back to the cultural past. For example, in the poetic narrative Star Waka (1999) Sullivan uses traditional Māori story-telling techniques (oral tradition) in order to confront topics from Aotearoa/New Zealand with European concepts within a "critical space of contemporary cultural politics". This approach allows him to study the identity relation between Māori and Pākehā within transcultural themes of voyaging, personal and national, of the poet and of Māori. In a sense, the poems in Star Waka "themselves function like a waka". Together with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri, he has co-edited several important anthologies of Polynesian and Māori poetry. For example, the collection Whetu Moana (2002) can be regarded as a pioneering book due to its significance as "the first anthology of contemporary Polynesian poetry in English edited by Polynesians." Sullivan works as "one of the editors of the online journal trout since its foundation in 1997." Trout is a journal that focuses on "poetry, prose, reviews, interviews, photography and artwork of or about New Zealand and/or Pacific writers and artists."

• Illustration — Kawe Reo / Voices Carry, a 2011 sculptural bench outside the Auckland Central City Library that incorporates poetry by Sullivan Authored: • Jazz Waiata (1990) • Piki Ake!: Poems 1990–92 (1993) • Maui – Legends of the Outcast (1996) • Star Waka (1999; German translation: Sternen-Waka, 2012) • Weaving Earth and Sky: Myths & Legends of Aotearoa (2002) • Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002) • Voice Carried My Family (2005) • Shout Ha! to the Sky (2010) • Cassino: City of Martyrs (2010) • Tūnui | Comet (2022) • Hopurangi―Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka (2024) Edited: * * *