Selina Tusitala Marsh Poet 1971
Award-winning poet and champion of Pasifika literature
In 2004, Selina Tusitala Marsh – of Samoan, Tuvaluan, Scottish and French ancestry – became the first person of Pacific descent to graduate with a PhD in English from the University of Auckland. In her doctoral thesis, Marsh focused on five Pacific women writers and argued that in post-colonial societies, literature was an important way that Pacific women and children found their voices and empowerment.
She described these women as "remarkable boundary breakers" – a description that could be applied to Marsh. Now lecturing at Auckland University, specialising in Māori and Pacific literary studies, Marsh last year became New Zealand's 11th poet laureate, charged with the task of promoting poetry everywhere.
She had a strong start on that even before being named poet laureate. In 2012, March represented Tuvalu in the Poetry Olympics, held during the London Olympic and Paralympic Games; in 2015, she attended the Australia and New Zealand Literary Festival in London where she won an amusing Literary Death Match for poets. She was dubbed Commonwealth Poet 2016 and commissioned to write and perform a poem before the Queen at the Commonwealth Day Observance in Westminster Abbey.
