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Alistair Te Ariki Campbell ONZM (25 June 1925 – 16 August 2009) was a poet, playwright, and novelist. Born in the Cook Islands, Campbell was the son of a Cook Island Māori mother and a Pākehā father, who both died when he was young, leading to him growing up in a New Zealand orphanage.
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell was one of New Zealand’s most distinctive poetic voices from the 1950s to the 2000s. His work, which combined lyricism and darkness, was shaped by an idyllic Rarotongan childhood, early family tragedies, childhood exile to New Zealand, and a transformative return to Polynesia in middle age.
Learn about the life and work of Alistair Campbell, a New Zealand poet of Cook Islands and Scottish heritage. Explore his poetry collections, novels, awards, and influences.
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell was a poet, novelist and playwright of Cook Island and European descent. He wrote numerous novels, plays and collections of poetry and received many awards including a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell was the first Polynesian poet to have a collection published in English, Mine Eyes Dazzle, published in 1950. The attractive qualities of his poems are obvious: confident and subtle lyricism, an aesthetic assuredness, a sensibility painfully aware of his own human vulnerability and of the redeeming power of love.
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell's published work includes seventeen collections of poems, four novels, two plays, a children's story, and an autobiography. His poetry has been set to music a number of times.
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Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (1925–2009) was born in Rarotonga and moved to New Zealand at the age of eight. His mother, Teu (née Bosini), came from the remote atoll of Tongareva (Penrhyn) and his father, Jock (John Archibald Campbell), was a successful trader from Otago, who emigrated to the islands in 1919 after service in the Gallipoli ...
