Ron Riddell

Ron Riddell has worked as a teacher, editor and bookseller and has performed his work in many festivals and cultural venues around the world, including The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Harbourfront (Canada), El Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín (Colombia), El Festival Internacional de Poesía de Cartagena (Colombia), The Austin International Poetry Festival (U.S.A.), El Encuentro Internacional de Poetas (El Salvador), International Poetry Festival in Costa Rica, Festival de Poesia de Bogota and Chilepoesia in Santiago, Chile. In Auckland in the 1970s Riddell founded The Titirangi Poets and later in the 1990s established a haven for poets with the Live Poets’ Café which adjoined the Dead Poets Bookshop in Karangahape Road. In Wellington he founded The Wellington International Poetry Festival. A painter, musician and the author of a number of plays and novels, he has published twenty-one collections of verse.

What a poem... Reading it I had the sense of being increasingly spellbound, of being transported to a place I’d previously not known about. Its repetitions had a hypnotic effect on me – it was like a music that returns to a coda at intervals along the way… a kind of extended Gregorian chant or a jazz musician’s riff open to endless interpretation.” - Bob Orr

List of Publications

Editor

Forty Years of Titirangi Poets, (Editor) Printable Reality, 2017
Anthology of the Third Wellington International Poetry Festival (Co-editor), (Casa Nueva, Wellington, 2005)
The Second Wellington International Poetry Festival Anthology (HeadworX, 2004)
The First Wellington International Poetry Festival Anthology (HeadworX, 2003)
The Titirangi Poets, Vol. 1 & 3 (Outrigger Publishers, 1977, 1981-2)

Poetry

The Wanderer (HeadworX, 2020)
Pachamama y el hombre jaguar (Spanish edition published by Esquina Tomada, Medellin, Colombia, 2018)
Pachamama and the Jaguar Man (Printable Reality, 2018)
Dance of Blue Dragonflies (Printable Reality, 2016)
Children in the Rain, poems and haiku (Printable Reality, 2014)
The Guardian of the Shield (novel) (Casa Nueva, Kindle/Amazon, 2013)
El oráculo de Alejandría/The Oracle of Alexandria (Endymion, Medellín, 2009)
Haikús selectos – Selected Haiku (Ron Riddell – Raúl Henao, Montaña de Silencio, Medellín, 2009)
Planet Haiku (Casa Nueva, 2008)
Azul Amarillo (Cedma, Málaga, Spain, 2007)
Raukura (Editorial Lunes, San José, Costa Rica, 2006)
Leaves of Light (Caza de Poesia, Los Angeles, U.S.A., 2005)
Spirit Songs (Casa Nueva/Steele Roberts, 2004)
Beads (Parnassus Press, 1975)
Persephone (Outrigger Publishers, 1977)
Northern Light (Parnassus Press, 1978)
Islands (Parnassus Press, 1978)
Paths of Fight (Writer and Artists Press, 1980)
The Christ Light (Solent Publishers, 1983)
Sense of Being (Writers and Artists Press, 1984)
Breathing Space (Coromandel Press, 1986)
Elegy for Barry Mitcalfe (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 1987)
How to Eat a Hot Dog on the Main Street of Thames (E.S.A.W. 1990)
Michelangelo Dreams (Puriri Press, 1997)
Love Songs for the Dead (Puriri Press, 1998)
El Milagro de Medellin y otros poemas (Casa Nueva Editores, 2002)

Fiction

The Greek Letter (novel) (Neoismist Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2007)
A Love Beyond (novel) (Casa Nueva, 2009)