C. K. Stead

An old friend, a new character - C. K. Stead is scribe to love and grief in this beautiful new collection. In two sequences, the poet plays with the lines of history and love, the fictional and the autobiographical. Reflecting on a long career and familiar faces, the first sequence walks the reader from classical Rome to contemporary Aotearoa. Then...

Award-winning author C.K. Stead takes us to the heart of contemporary Paris and into a world of books and witty conversation. The Necessary Angel is a story of people grappling with love and fidelity; a story about the importance of books; a commentary on living in complex modern-day Europe; and a page-turning mystery. With a surprising twist at the end,...

In the 1970s a young professor, I rescued from a puddle in Princes Street a Penguin of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, dried it and read it, annotating as I went, underlining his thought that one must have chaos within if one is to give birth to a dancing star – At 93, his wife Kay and son Oliver recently dead,...