Andrew Johnston

Guest writer

Andrew Johnston won the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for poetry. After 25 years as a journalist, he is now an editor and consultant for the United Nations and NGOs, based in France. He was born in Upper Hutt in 1963.

Troops moving up to the trenches, Flanders, October 5, 1917. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Mangel-wurzel, monster of endless war

Today people all over the world will come together to think about World War I and those who fought in it. How could we remember better? And what can we do with remembering?

By Andrew Johnston | 11th November, 2018

Poetry week at the Spinoff: how an award-winning poet got started

Poetry week at the Spinoff: how an award-winning poet got started

All week this week the Spinoff Review of Books is devoted to poetry in the build-up to the Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day on Friday. Yesterday we ran an essay by Helen Hogan, editor of 1970s anthologies of poetry by New Zealand college students; today, an essay by distinguished poet Andrew Johnston, who Hogan published when he was a 14-year-old schoolboy in the Hutt Valley.

By Andrew Johnston | 22nd August, 2017

Poetry for the soul

The Friday poem: A sequence from ‘Echo in Limbo’, by Andrew Johnston

A sequence of poems by Andrew Johnston, a New Zealand writer who lives in Paris.

By Andrew Johnston | 4th March, 2016