Photo credit Victoria Birkinshaw
Born in Blenheim in 1959, John Newton grew up on a sheep farm at Port Underwood in the Marlborough Sounds. He taught for two years in the English Department at Melbourne, and from 1995 to 2009 in the English Department at the University of Canterbury, and now lives in Wellington. The Double Rainbow: James K Baxter, Ngati Hau and the Jerusalem Commune was published by VUP in 2009, and Hard Frost: Structures of Feeling in New Zealand Literature 1908–1945 in 2017.
John Newton’s debut volume Tales from the Angler’s Eldorado came out in 1985, and his work is represented in most of the major anthologies to have appeared since that time. Lives of the Poets (2010) is the long-awaited follow-up.
