Alistair Campbell, the celebrated Cook Islands and New Zealand poet, playwright and novelist has died, aged 84. Campbell was born in Rarotonga in 1925, shifting to live in a Dunedin orphanage at the age of eight after his parents died. As a young man, Campbell moved to Wellington where he joined the Wellington Group, writing alongside the likes of James K Baxter, Louis Johnson and W. H. Oliver. He had early success with his first book Mine Eyes Dazzle in 1950. In 1961 he wrote a novel for children The Happy Summer before writing a series of six plays for radio. The best-known of them was Bough Breaks (1970), which was later turned into a stage version and published in McNaughton’s Contemporary New Zealand Plays in 1974. He tutored creative writing nationally and internationally, and was president of the writers’ organisation, PEN, for a year. In 1997, Campbell was awarded the Pacific Islands Artist’s Award and in 1999, he received an honorary doctorate in literature from Victoria University of Wellington. He received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for poetry in 2005 and was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the same year. (Content adapted from One News).
