Ruth Dallas

Longlisted for the 2026 General Non-Fiction Ockham New Zealand Book Award 

Words break out of us;
We are made of words, as leaves
Make sheltering trees.

From ‘Haiku’ by Ruth Dallas

Ruth Dallas (1919–2008) is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most respected and influential literary voices. Yet despite her international success and her enduring presence as one of the country’s most anthologised poets, the full extent of her contribution to New Zealand literature has been relatively unexamined and under-appreciated. Now Diana Morrow’s comprehensive biography, Ruth Dallas: A writer’s life, redresses this imbalance, and gives this outwardly reserved South Islander her overdue place in the spotlight as a significant poet, fiction writer and children’s author.

Drawing on Dallas’s 1991 autobiography, Curved Horizon, her writing notebooks and journals, and letters and interviews, Morrow shows how the girl whose first published work appeared in the children’s pages of the Southland Daily News grew up to become the internationally acclaimed author of nine poetry collections, a book of short stories and eight children’s books.

Ruth Dallas: A writer’s life illuminates Dallas’s personal and professional relationships, describes major formative episodes in her life – including the traumatic loss of an eye as a teenager – and investigates her inspirations and creative process. Morrow brilliantly captures the inter-regional jousting of the post-war New Zealand literary scene, and Dallas’s independent-minded and highly respected presence within it. An early and regular contributor to Landfall, Dallas became both a friend and a trusted literary advisor to the journal’s founding editor, Charles Brasch, working for a time as Landfall’s ‘secretary’ – a role perhaps more justly described as co-editor. As well as Brasch, Dallas’s circle of friends and colleagues included James K. Baxter, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Roderick Finlayson, Janet Frame and Basil Dowling.

In this beautifully written and generously illustrated biography, Morrow gives us the Ruth Dallas that her family and friends knew and loved: a private person with a lively outlook on life; a serious and informed writer with an impish sense of humour; and a writer of rare clarity and insight whose work has enriched the lives of generations of readers in New Zealand and around the world.