Best New Zealand Poems 2002
  
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ANNE KENNEDY has published a novella and two novels. A book of poetry, Sing-song is due from Auckland University Press in May. Her short fictions have featured widely in New Zealand journals and anthologies. She has been awarded the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award, the ICI Award and a Literary Fellowship at the University of Auckland. Anne Kennedy works as a scriptwriter – most recently adapting Monkey’s Mask for cinema – and as a reviewer. She lives in Auckland with her partner, Robert Sullivan, and their two children.

Kennedy comments: ‘Cat Tales is from a book-length sequence, Sing-song. The sequence tells the story of the onslaught of severe eczema in a child, triggered by a homeopathic treatment. I started out to write the story as an essay or article, which I hoped to sell to a magazine, as a warning to the general public about the pitfalls of alternative medicine. I felt I had a duty to do this. I soon realised I had more to say on the subject of children and families and illness and love than they would stomach in The Woman’s Weekly, or North and South magazine. I wanted to say these things in a way that transcended or became more than the real events – i.e., became a kind of poetry. But I never lost the feeling of my mission to let people know.’

 

 
    
   

Auckland University Press

New Zealand Book Council

JAAM

 
  
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