...when her poems ‘Monica” (after Monica Geller from Friends) and “Keats is Dead So Fuck Me From Behind” went viral. She graduated from the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2011, where she won the Adam Prize for best folio, previous winners of which have included Eleanor Catton and Ashleigh Young. She then threw that folio out, and spent five years working on her first book ‘Hera Lindsay Bird.’

She has performed with musicians such as Nadia Reid and Aldous Harding, and done collaborations with artists working in different mediums, including a commissioned piece about Cindy Sherman for the Wellington City Gallery Exhibition. She has traveled to Mexico, Scotland and Edinburgh with her poetry, and Australia so many times she’s starting to develop an accent.

In 2016 she ran a free, ten week pop-up school in creative Nonfiction called TMI (Too Much Information) and has since taught many workshops in New Zealand and Australia

Her work has been featured in the Guardian, Vice Magazine, i-D Magazine, the Spinoff, The Sunday Magazine, The Wireless, Radio New Zealand and Atlanta NPR and she has written for publications such as The Hairpin, The Toast, The Poetry Review, The Spinoff, The Listener, Snorkel, Metro Magazine, Hue & Cry, Sweet Mammalian, Sport, The Pantograph Punch, Scum Magazine, The Lifted Brow, Turbine, Shabby Dollhouse, Minarets, Left, Queen Mobs, Pouch Magazine and more.

In 2017, her book won the Jessie McKay prize for the best first book of poetry at the Ockham Book Awards and the 2017 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize judged by Carol Ann Duffy. In the same year, Hera received a 2017 Arts Foundation New Generation Award.

Her poetry book has sold thousands of copies in New Zealand and abroad, and is coming out with Penguin Books in November 2017.

Her work is fresh, provocative and funny, with equal parts exploding helicopters, violets at dusk and oral sex. Her book has been controversial and has raised many eyebrows in the literary community and rest homes around the country, but fans of her writing include Lorde, Karen Walker, John Campbell, Neil Finn, Kate Sylvester, Kim Hill, Simon Blackwell, Steve Braunias, Ashleigh Young’s mother, her own mother and that guy who played Kevin in the British Office and is famous for eating a scotch egg.

When she’s not writing poetry, she is a bookseller by trade, and her hobbies include watching figure skating at the Olympics and reading murder mysteries with tasteful amounts of blood in them.