Jenner wins 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award

In Aotearoa New Zealand, Lynn Jenner has been announced as the winner of the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award for her manuscript The Gum Trees of Kerikeri.

The collection is set in Te Tai Tokerau Northland and “reflects on place, history and belonging through finely observed details”.

Judge Chris Tse said, “From my first read I was drawn into its meditations on the connections between people, the environment and art. It shows how poetry and art can uncover new understandings of the world and our own circumstances, even when the speaker doubts that any of it is useful in a world speeding towards catastrophe. Jenner’s sensitive engagement reminds us that poetry can be found in the smallest moments – moments intertwined with a much larger tapestry of human experience.”

Jenner is a writer of essays, poetry, non-fiction and hybrid texts. Her debut collection Dear Sweet Harry (Auckland UP, 2010) won the Best First Book Award for Poetry in the New Zealand Post Book Awards and the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry. Her four-part hybrid of memoir, essays, prose poems and poetry, Lost and Gone Away (Auckland UP, 2015), was a Metro Best Books (2015) selection and finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (2016).

She said her poems, “reflect my experience of arriving in a place with a long and complex history, where the effects of that history are still very much present. They also ask how we are supposed to live in these times when so many terrible things are happening beyond our control.”

The Gum Trees of Kerikeri will be published by Otago University Press in 2026.

More information is available on the Te Whare Tā o Ōtakou Whakaihu Waka (Otago University Press) website.

Category: Awards Local news