William Sewell (poet)

William Seymour (Bill) Sewell (1 December 1951 – 29 January 2003) was a New Zealand poet. He was a Burns Fellow at Otago University, Dunedin in 1981–82. He was a frequent reviewer of books, particularly for the periodical New Zealand Books, to which he was appointed co-editor in 1997. He was also a book editor. He died of cancer in Wellington.[1]

He published three collections of poems: Solo Flight (1982), Wheels within Wheels (1983) and Making the Far Land Glow (1986) and also A Guide to the Rimutaka Forest Park (1989). His poems have a link to modern German poetry and a political focus e.g. The Ballad of Fifty-one, about the 1951 waterfront dispute and Erebus: A Poem, about the 1979 Erebus disaster.

He was born in Athens in 1951 where his parents Rosemary Seymour and William Arthur Sewell were living at the time. His father was a former professor of English at the University of Auckland and later both his parents taught at the University of Waikato. [2]

He lived in Southern Europe and then England where he attended school. He studied German at the University of Auckland and lectured in German at the University of Otago. He completed a PhD on the poetry of Hans Magnus Enzensberger at the University of Otago in 1978.[3] He had a law degree from the Victoria University of Wellington and was a legal researcher for the Law Commission.