Harry Ricketts is a poet, biographer, essayist and professor emeritus in the English Programme at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. He has published around 30 books. He is a great admirer of verse novels (from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh to Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask), though the closest he has come to writing one himself is a sequence of poems about an imaginary German-New Zealand poet called Stella. Photo credit Robert Cross.
