Michele Leggott

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Michele Leggott, poet and literary scholar, was born in Stratford, New Zealand, in 1956. She received her secondary education at New Plymouth Girls High School, before attending the University of Canterbury where she completed an MA in English in 1979. She then moved to Canada to do a PhD at the University of British Columbia. Her dissertation was on the American poet Louis Zukofsky and was published in America as Reading Zukovsky’s “80 Flowers” (1989).

Leggott began publishing her poetry around 1980. She published Sound Pitch Considered Forms with two Canadian poets in 1984. In 1985 she returned to New Zealand and took up a lectureship at the University of Auckland. She produced her first book of poems, Like This?, in 1988, winning the International PEN First Book of Poetry award. In 1991 she published Swimmers, Dancers, with a domestic focus, and in 1995 she won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry with DIA.

Her work has appeared in the Best New Zealand Poems series in 2002 and 2005.