Janet Charman has published seven poetry collections: Most recently At the White Coast (Auckland UP, 2012), a memoir of a year working in London during the Thatcher era. The manuscript of that collection was joint winner of the 2010 IWW (Auckland) Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Previously Unpublished Sequence of Poems. Her collection Cold Snack, (Auckland UP, 2007) won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 2008. She has an MA First, in English, from the University of Auckland, where she tutored New Zealand literature for several years and was the 1997 writer in residence. Charman trained as a general and maternity nurse on leaving high school and has also worked in secondary teaching. She lives with her partner and their two daughters, in Auckland.
Poem notes
‘of our lucky eight’ is from ‘surrender’, a sequence of poems related to Janet Charman’s tenure of a 2009 writer’s fellowship at Hong Kong Baptist University.
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