Author(s): Ian Wedde

Poetry | Aotearoa

The Little Ache – a German notebook was written in 2013–14, while Ian Wedde was researching his acclaimed novel The Reed Warbler. In Berlin and the north of Germany around Kiel, nineteenth-century ancestors whisper to him amid the clamour of history and the pleasures of daily life.

Author Biography: Ian Wedde is the author of eight novels, fifteen collections of poetry, two collections of essays, and a number of anthologies and art monographs. His memoir, The Grass Catcher: A Digression About Home, was published in 2014, his Selected Poems in 2017, and his novel The Reed Warbler in 2020. Wedde is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships and grants. Among the most recent are the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship at Menton in France (2005), a Fulbright New Zealand Travel Award to the USA (2006), an Arts Foundation Laureate Award (2006), a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Auckland (2007), an ONZM (2010), and the Landfall Essay Prize (2010). In 2011-13 Wedde was New Zealand's poet laureate. He was awarded the Creative New Zealand Writers' Residency in Berlin 2013-14, and in 2014 the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement (poetry). He lives and works in Auckland.