Hera Lindsay Bird

Hera Lindsay Bird’s self-titled book became the fastest selling poetry collection in New Zealand when her poems ‘Monica’ (after Monica Geller from Friends) and ‘Keats is Dead So Fuck Me From Behind’ went viral. 

Hera graduated from the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2011, where she won the Adam Prize for best folio, previous winners of which have included Eleanor Catton and Ashleigh Young. She then threw that folio out, and spent five years working on her first book ‘Hera Lindsay Bird’.

She has performed with musicians such as Nadia Reid and Aldous Harding, and undertaken collaborations with artists working in different mediums, including a commissioned piece about Cindy Sherman for the Wellington City Gallery Exhibition and a jewellery collaboration with Underground Sundae. She has traveled to Mexico, Canada, The UK, Ireland, Poland and Lithuania with her poetry, and Australia so many times she’s starting to develop an accent. 

In 2016, Hera ran a free, ten-week pop-up school in creative nonfiction called TMI (Too Much Information) and has since taught many workshops in New Zealand and Australia.

Her work has been featured in the Guardian, Vice Magazine, i-D Magazine, the Spinoff, The Sunday Magazine, The Wireless, Radio New Zealand and Atlanta NPR. She has written for publications such as The Hairpin, The Toast, The Poetry Review, The Spinoff, The Listener, Snorkel, Metro Magazine, Hue & Cry, Sweet Mammalian, Sport, The Pantograph Punch, Scum Magazine, The Lifted Brow, Turbine, Shabby Dollhouse, Minarets, Left, Queen Mobs, Pouch Magazine and more.

In 2017, Hera’s book won the Jessie McKay prize for the best first book of poetry at the Ockham Book Awards and the 2017 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize. She was a 2017 Arts Foundation New Generation Award recipient. 

Her poetry book has sold thousands of copies in New Zealand and abroad and was published by Penguin UK in 2017. Her poetry pamphlet ‘Pamper Me to Hell & Back’ came out with the Poetry Business in 2018. 

When she’s not writing poetry, Hera is a bookseller by trade, and her hobbies include watching figure skating at the Olympics and reading murder mysteries with tasteful amounts of blood in them. 

Here are some dates: 

1987 Born in Thames in the Coromandel on the last day of the year
 
1995 Won a lookalike contest with pet Airdale
 
2009 Won the Maurice Gee Prize in Children’s Writing and the Story!inc Poetry Prize
 
2011 Won the Adam Prize for best folio during her MA at the International Institute of Modern Letters

2013 Moved to Port Chalmers and wrote a book for three years while watching nine seasons of the Nanny
 
2016 Published ‘Hera Lindsay Bird’ with Victoria University Press
 
2017 Won Jessie Mckay Prize for the best first book of poetry at the Ockham Book Awards and the Sarah Broom prize judged by Carol Ann Duffy.