The New Zealand poet Fleur Adcock, who celebrated her 90th birthday in February with the publication of her Collected Poems, has died in the North London Hospice in Finchley, after a short illness.

Fleur Adcock was born in Papakura, New Zealand in 1934, but lived much of her life in England, cindluing during the second world war. A number of poems recounting that time were published in the magazine PN Review in 2004. She studied Classics at the University of Wellington, gaining a BA in 1954 and an MA in 1956, and worked as a librarian in New Zealand from 1958 to 1963. She married poet Alistair Te Ariki Campbell in 1952, divorcing in 1958. Her second marriage to novelist Barry Crump in 1962 only lasted five months, and they divorced in 1963.

She emigrated to Britain in 1963 with her younger son Andrew, working as a librarian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London until 1979. Her first collection, The Eye of the Hurricane, was published in New Zealand in 1964. She received an OBE in 1986, and was presented with the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for 2006, with recognition given in particular for her Poems 1960-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2000).

Her mother was a poet, and her younger sister Marilyn Duckworth is a celebrated novelist in New Zealand. Fleur Adcock was presented with the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2019.

She was awarded two residencies in the north of England over three years, which enabled her to switch from working as a librarian to supporting herself as a freelance writer. In 1977-78 she was writer-in-residence at Charlotte Mason College of Education, Ambleside, in Cumbria. She was Northern Arts Literary Fellow at the universities of Newcastle and Durham in 1979-81, living in Newcastle for those two years.

Her publisher in the UK, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley said: “Fleur Adcock’s Below Loughrigg was the second publication from Bloodaxe Books, then a fledgling small press, back in 1979, and we were fortunate in her letting us publish three other titles, two pamphlets and a translation, between then and 2000, when she brought the first of all of her subsequent books to Bloodaxe following Oxford University Press’s closure of its poetry list.”

Her Poems 1960-2000 was followed by Dragon Talk (2010), Glass Wings (2013), The Land Ballot (2015), Hoard (2017) and The Mermaid's Purse (2021). Her Collected Poems was published both by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and Te Herenga Waka University Press in New Zealand on her 90th birthday in February 2024.

According to the Poetry Foundation, “Adcock’s poetry frequently investigates questions of identity and belonging: individual poems consider matters of ancestry, geography and displacement, and the natural worlds of England and New Zealand. Her style is often described as cool, observational and slyly ironic.”

Neil Astley added: “Fleur was always a delight to work with on all her books … She became a treasured and trusted friend as well as a poet whose work I felt privileged to publish. Despite failing eyesight, she took up the challenge of helping us launch her marvellous Collected Poems this year, using enlarged photocopies of her poems to give much appreciated readings from the book in her warm, inimitable style to audiences in London, St Andrews, Newcastle and Ledbury.

“Fleur was also a pioneer in British and New Zealand poetry: for many years she was one of very few women poets known to the reading public with the poetry lists of the main book publishers consisting almost entirely of white male poets, and the poetry anthologies featuring very few – if any – women writers. All that seems inconceivable now. Fleur's work and example were inspirational for the generations of women poets who followed her, helping bring about the huge shift which has made poetry publishing much more diverse, inclusive and representative of all writers in both of her countries during the latter part of her writing career.”

Earlier this year she gave a reading at Newcastle poetry festival, and you can watch the video here. At the reading she opened with the poem ‘Things’, “because it settles the nerves”.

In reviewing her Collected Poems for Write Out Loud, Neil Leadbeater said: “Throughout her work, even though she often places herself within her poems, there is a notable element of detachment. Nothing ever lapses into sentimentality. Everything is calmly summed up, emotion reined in.”