Fleur Adcock


Fleur Adcock is a New Zealand poet and editor, of English and Northern Irish ancestry, who has lived much of her life in England.

Early life

Fleur Adcock, the older of two sisters, was born in Papakura to Cyril John Adcock and Irene Robinson Adcock. She spent eight years of her childhood in England. Adcock studied Classics at Victoria University of Wellington, graduating with an MA.

Career

Adcock worked as an assistant lecturer and later an assistant librarian at the University of Otago in Dunedin between 1958 and 1962 and at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington in 1962–1963.
In 1963, she returned to England and took up a post as an assistant librarian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London until 1979 when she resigned to become a full-time writer, taking up the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship in Newcastle upon Tyne and Durham in 1979–81. Since then she has been a freelance writer, living in East Finchley, north London, a translator and poetry commentator for the BBC.
Her first volume of poetry published in Britain was Tigers in 1967.
Adcock's poetry is typically concerned with themes of place, human relationships and everyday activities, but frequently with a dark twist given to the mundane events she writes about. Formerly, her early work was influenced by her training as a classicist but her more recent work is looser in structure and more concerned with the world of the unconscious mind.

Personal life

Adcock was married to two notable New Zealand literary personalities. In August 1952, she married Alistair Campbell, and in February 1962 she married Barry Crump, divorcing in 1963. She has two sons, Gregory and Andrew. Her sister Marilyn Duckworth is a novelist.

Poetry collections