Fleur Adcock, CNZM, OBE (born 10 February 1934 in New Zealand) is a poet and an editor of English and Northern Irish ancestry, who has lived much of her life in England.
Adcock was born in Auckland, but spent the years between 1939 and 1947 living and studying in England. She is a sister to Marilyn Duckworth. She studied Classics at the Victoria University of Wellington, graduating with a M.A.. She worked as an assistant lecturer librarian at the University of Otago in Dunedin until 1961. She was married to two famous New Zealand literary personalities. In 1952 she married Alistair Campbell, and later divorced. Then in 1962 she married Barry Crump, divorcing in 1963.
In 1963, Adcock returned to England and took up a post as librarian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. Apart from a brief return to New Zealand in 1975-1976, she has lived in East Finchley, north London ever since, teaching and working as a freelance writer.
Adcock's poetry is typically concerned with themes of place and everyday activities, but frequently with a dark twist given to the mundane events she writes about. Formally, 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.
1983: Selected Poems, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press
1986: Hotspur: a ballad, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books
1986: The Incident Book, Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press
1988: Meeting the Comet, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books
1991: Time-zones, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press
1991: Selected Poems, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press
1993: Mary Magdalene and the Birds: Mezzo-sporano and Clarinet, by Dorothy Buchanan, with words by Fleur Adcock, Wellington: Waiteata Press
1993: Five Modern Poets: Fleur Adcock, U.A. Fanthorpe, Tony Harrison, Anne Stevenson, Derek Walcott, Edited by Barbara Bleiman, Harlow, England: Longman
1997: Looking Back, Oxford and Auckland: Oxford University Press
2000: Poems 1960-2000, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books
2004: Contributor, The 2nd Wellington International Poetry Festival Anthology, Edited and compiled by Mark Pirie, Ron Riddell and Saray Torres. Wellington: HeadworX
2010 Dragon Talk. Bloodaxe
Edited or translated
1982: Editor, Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry, Auckland: Oxford University Press
1983: Editor, The Virgin and the Nightingale: Medieval Latin poems, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books,
1987: Editor, Faber Book of 20th Century Women's Poetry, London and Boston: Faber and Faber
1989: Translator, Orient Express: Poems. Grete Tartler, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press
1992: Translator, Letters from Darkness: Poems, Daniela Crasnaru, Oxford: Oxford University Press
1994: Translator and editor, Hugh Primas and the Archpoet, Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press
1995: Editor (with Jacqueline Simms), The Oxford Book of Creatures, verse and prose anthology, Oxford: Oxford University Press
