Poet · Novelist · Essayist

Sue Wootton

Fiction and poetry widely published and anthologised in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. Translated into Hungarian, Romanian, Spanish and Vietnamese.

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About Sue

Sue Wootton is a poet, novelist, short story writer and essayist. She lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand. A former physiotherapist and acupuncturist, Sue writes about all kinds of things but has a particular interest in the intersection of medicine and the humanities.

She holds a PhD from the University of Otago, researching how literary writing contributes to the understanding of health and wellbeing. Sue co-edits the Medical Humanities e-magazine Corpus: Conversations about Medicine and Life.

Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems 2025
Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship 2020
NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship 2018
Robert Burns Fellowship 2008

Full biography

Featured Poem

Sea foam at Gemstone Beach

Yellow sea foam is emerging from the ocean, wave upon wave of jelly-creatures slithering from salt to shore. Here it comes, a species long cradled in the deep, shedding fathoms, shedding sea-water, not yet limbed for land.

Spongy-looking, lung-like. On they come. Quivering, shuddering, sucking at gravity, light, the searing wind. Never has there been such pain. Excruciating. Addictive. They must! They must! They will! They will!

They scud, they skate, and each metre more onto the beach is another bone cell imagining itself out of jelly. Is this joy? It is joy! Shake, shake! Jelly-creatures conquer the world! Until the sandbank, its small wall studded with gemstones.

Quartz, topaz, amethyst. Earth-kilned, earth-polished, each is reversing out of land. Not so as you'd notice, but plop, plop, eon by eon, they are falling back to the beach. Still the yellow sea foam comes, and piles in a wobble

at the barrier, puzzling at solidity. Concentrate! Concentrate! Wings? Wings! The first shreds fly up and over.

— Sue Wootton

Critical Acclaim

What They're Saying

The Yield

"One of the most satisfying, intelligent, well-crafted and involving volumes of New Zealand poetry I have read in the last decade."
— Nicholas Reid, Reid's Reader

"They are prisms. Prisms of place, prisms of worship, of wonder, of family, of oddities of language, of dead friends remembered."
— Liz Breslin, Landfall Review Online

Strip

"Compelling and extraordinarily humane … skilful characterisation and excellent pacing."
— Sally Blundell, NZ Listener

"A smart, sexy, quietly subversive novel from an author who totally knows what she is doing."
— Tina Shaw, Landfall Review Online

Now published in Bulgaria as Fleur.