William Sewell (poet)

William Seymour (Bill) Sewell (1 December 1951 – 29 January 2003) was a New Zealand poet. He was a Burns Fellow at Otago University, Dunedin in 1981–82. He was a frequent reviewer of books, particularly for the periodical New Zealand Books, to which he was appointed co-editor in 1997. He was also a book editor. He died of cancer in Wellington.^[1]

He published three collections of poems: Solo Flight (1982), Wheels within Wheels (1983) and Making the Far Land Glow (1986) and also A Guide to the Rimutaka Forest Park (1989). His poems have a link to modern German poetry and a political focus e.g. ''The Ballad of Fifty-one about the 1951 waterfront dispute and Erebus: A poem about the 1979 Erebus disaster

He was born in Athens where his father William Arthur Sewell, a professor of English at the University of Auckland and the University of Waikato, was then teaching. He lived in Southern Europe and then England where he attended school. He studied German at the University of Auckland and lectured in German at the University of Otago. He had a law degree from the Victoria University of Wellington and was a legal researcher for the Law Commission.

References

• Robinson & Wattie (1998). The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature. Oxford University Press. p. 487. ISBN 0-19-558348-5.