Rate My Professor Sue Wootton

Sue Wootton is a poet, novelist, essayist, and publisher at Otago University Press, University of Otago. Originally trained as a physiotherapist, she worked in that field for twenty years before pursuing creative writing and academic studies. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of Otago in 2003 and completed a PhD at the same university in 2020. Her doctoral research, conducted through the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies and the Department of General Practice, focused on medical humanities, examining how literary writing functions as a mode of expressing insights about the human meaning of illness, well-being, and medicine. Her thesis, titled ‘Life sentences: articulating recoveries in poetry and prose,’ explored literary explorations of mobility and immobility as resources for well-being. During her PhD, she was a candidate in the Department of English and Linguistics. In 2008, Wootton held the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, where she developed short stories, essays, poems for a third collection, and an illustrated children's story.

Wootton’s publications include five poetry collections, notably Hourglass (Steele Roberts, 2005), By Birdlight (Steele Roberts, 2011), Out of Shape (Ampersand Duck, 2013), and The Yield (Otago University Press, 2017); the novel Strip (Mākaro Press, 2016); the short story collection The Happiest Music on Earth (Rosa Mira Books, 2013); and the children’s book Cloudcatcher (Steele Roberts, 2010). Her work appears widely in New Zealand and international anthologies, with translations into Hungarian, Romanian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. She has received the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (2020), NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship (2018), and the Robert Burns Fellowship (2008), along with shortlistings for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for The Yield (2018) and Strip (2017), and various poetry prizes including the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems (2025) and the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize (2015). Since 2021, as Publisher at Otago University Press, she oversees editorial, production, and publicity, contributing to the dissemination of scholarly and creative works. Her influence extends through judging literary competitions, such as the 2020 Writer competition, and co-editing the Corpus medical humanities blog.