Martin Edmond was born in Ohakune, New Zealand, the town in the cover photo of his new book Waimarino County & other excursions. The photo of the main street of Ohakune with Mount Ruapehu looming over it was taken by B.V. Davis in 1938. This book is an enthralling collection of discursive essays and short prose works concerned with memory, travelling, imagination and dreaming, identity and ‘other excursions’. To quote from an early part of the book ..when we had moved from Huntly to Heretaunga, and my father suffered his first breakdown and my mother announced herself as a poet, it came to be time for me to leave home and I did so on the Limited Express...A description of that formative train trip follows, and Martin's mother’s recent announcement draws attention to the fact that she was the well-known New Zealand poet Lauris Edmond. After finishing undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in English and anthropology Martin briefly worked as a junior lecturer at Victoria University, in Wellington. Then he joined the avant-garde theatre group Red Mole, touring New Zealand, the US, Mexico, UK and Europe. Martin moved to Sydney in 1981. He currently lives in Summer Hill and works as a writer and a taxi-driver. He keeps several blogs including the taxi-driving one, cleverly named dérives.

I mentioned Martin’s recent book Luca Antara : Passages in Search of Australia here on the deletions in January this year.



You can read a short prose piece by Martin Edmond on nzepc

Martin will be in conversation with Sydney poet Adam Aitken at
Better Read Than Dead Bookstore
265 King Street
Newtown, Sydney
at 6.30pm
Tuesday 7th August

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