C. K. Stead was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1932. From the late 1950s, he began to earn an international reputation as a poet and literary critic - his book The New Poetic has sold over 100,0000 copies - and, later, as a novelist. He has published over 40 books and received numerous honors recognizing his contribution to literature, including a CBE (1974), an Honorary DLitt from the University of Bristol (2001), the CNZ Michael King Fellowship (2005), the Order of New Zealand (2007) and, in 2009, the $60,000 Prime Minister's Award for Fiction and the Montana New Zealand Book Award (Reference and Anthology) for his Collected Poems. In 2010 he won the world's richest short story award, the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award worth ?,000, and his poem 'Ischaemia' won the Hippocrates Prize (open section), worth ?00.