Writer, editor & performer
Liz Breslin is a writer, editor and performer of Polish, Irish and English descent, now living in Ōtepoti Dunedin in Aotearoa New Zealand. Liz’s poem collections are In bed with the feminists (Dead Bird Books, 2021, 2023), winner of the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems 2020, and Alzheimer’s and a spoon (OUP, 2017, 2021), one of the NZ Listener’s Top 100 books of 2017.
Liz’s poems can also be found in places including Landfall, The Spinoff, The Friday Poem, takahē, Peach Fuzz, Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry, Rapture: An Anthology of Performance Poetry from Aotearoa/New Zealand and Ōrongohau Best New Zealand Poems.
Liz’s short story ‘baba jaga’ was highly commended in the 2022 Sargeson Prize. ‘Not the fucking pineapple’ was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2021 and ‘the very bones’ won the Queenstown Festival Short Story Competition 2020.
Liz loves collaboration and is co-creator of rail:lines with Laura Williamson and Annabel Wilson and of the possibilities project with Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature. Residencies include two months in Krakow, Poland in 2019, a virtual stay at the National Centre for Writing, UK, in 2021 and three weeks at the Michael King Writers Centre in Auckland in August 2023.
Liz is a creative critical PhD candidate (and recipient of a City of Literature scholarship) at the University of Otago, making zines about cycles of settler coloniser gossip, violence and erasure in the rural south of Te Waipounamu the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Extract from colonise your own adventure
