Tell Me My Name

Tell Me My Name is a sequence of thirteen riddles by Bill Manhire, set to music by composer Norman Meehan and sung by Hannah Griffin. This hardback book includes the full texts and eight photographs by celebrated artist Peter Peryer, and includes a music CD. The stage production will be premiered at Wanaka’s Festival of Color in April 2017, and performed elsewhere in New Zealand later in the year. Bill Manhire, Norman Meehan and Hannah Griffin have collaborated on four celebrated earlier releases: Buddhist Rain, Making Baby Float and Small Holes in the Silence (Rattle Records) and These Rough Notes (VUP). Tell Me My Name is published simultaneously with Bill Manhire’s new poetry collection Some Things to Place in a Coffin.

Bill Manhire was born in Invercargill in 1946 and educated at the Universities of Otago and London. For many years he taught at Victoria University, where he founded the International Institute of Modern Letters, which is home to New Zealand’s leading creative writing program. He is now Emeritus Professor of English and Creative Writing at Victoria, and was recently UNESCO Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.