Harry Ricketts

Ricketts was born in London in 1950. His father, Jack (John) Ricketts, was a career officer in the British Army, serving in World War II and in Malaya and Hong Kong in the 1950s.[3] Ricketts was brought up in London, Malaysia and Hong Kong.[4] He was educated first at a prep school in Kent and later at Wellington College, Berkshire.[5]

From an early age, Ricketts developed an interest in cricket and opened the bowling for two years for the Wellington College First XI.[6] After school, he studied English at Oxford University completing a BA (1st Class Honours) and an MLitt on Kipling's short stories (1975).[7] He then taught at the University of Hong Kong (1974–1977) and the University of Leicester (1978–1981) before moving to New Zealand.[8] At Leicester, he knew the poet and critic G. S. Fraser and became friends with the poet Robert Wells.[9]

In 1981, Ricketts took up a lectureship in the English Department at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and for many years has run a Modern Poetry course, combining British, American and New Zealand poets.[10] In the 1990s he taught poetry workshops for the Continuing Education Centre at Victoria[11] and more recently has taught non-fiction and fiction writing courses for the IIML (International Institute of Modern Letters).[12]

Ricketts began writing poetry at school. At Oxford he was arts editor of the student newspaper Cherwell and wrote for the OSAC magazine, interviewing writers like John Wain.[13]

During the 1980s, he started to publish academic work, such as an edition of Rudyard Kipling's ‘lost’ New Zealand story "One Lady at Wairakei" (1983) and a valuable book of interviews with New Zealand poets, Talking about Ourselves (1986). This book introduced Ricketts to the New Zealand poetry scene, and he became friends with the Wellington poets Louis Johnson and Lauris Edmond.[14]

He also became involved with the New Zealand Poetry Society, edited anthologies for them, was president for a time in the late 1980s, and at Victoria encouraged his students through the student publication Writings and later JAAM magazine in the 1990s, a Victoria Writer's Club magazine that became international.[15]

Roger Robinson comments on his poetry that: "Ricketts’ best are either deftly satiric 'light verse' ... or wry commentaries on the perplexities of love, marriage or parenthood."[16]

Aside from his own literary writing, Ricketts has been an anthologist since the 1990s. His work in this field includes How You Doing?: A Selection of New Zealand Comic and Satiric Verse (1998), with Hugh Roberts, and a two-volume series of spiritual verse anthologies, co-edited with Paul Morris and Mike Grimshaw, before editing The Awa Book of New Zealand Sports Writing (2010). His sports anthology was one of the Best 100 Books of 2010 in the New Zealand Listener.[17]

A Wall Street Journal reviewer observed of The Unforgiving Minute that: 'of all the Kipling biographies, Harry Ricketts is the most balanced.'[18] The New Yorker reviewer in turn noted that 'Ricketts, a poet, is invaluable in analysing the subtleties and the modernist techniques that went into Kipling's popular, accessible work.'[19]

In 2010, with Paula Green, he co-authored the poetry primer 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry (2010). He has also contributed scholarly entries to the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, reviewed books for Radio New Zealand National, acted as a theatre critic for the New Zealand Listener (1998–2007), and co-edited the review journal New Zealand Books since the late 1998.[20]

Ricketts was awarded the Pou Aronui Award by Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2021.[21]

• profile on New Zealand Book Council website
• Harry Ricketts’ publication record at Department of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
• Ingrid Horrocks’ launch speech for Harry Ricketts' Just Then (2012)
• Harry Ricketts looks back on 21 years of NZ Review of Books / Pukapuka Aotearoa