Thanks for visiting. Sam Hunt is New Zealand’s pre eminent Poet. He has been writing poems almost all his life and has toured throughout New Zealand and beyond for over 40 years.

Find out more about Sam on this page, read poems selected by Sam, purchase his books and albums , check out his upcoming Gigs and performances and request your own private audience with New Zealand’s unique artist-in-residence.

Sam was born in 1946 and grew up in Castor Bay, Auckland. It was a coastal childhood filled with poems. Both parents and their colourful circle of family and friends often had poems on their lips – usually told from memory. The Catholic Mass made its mark on Sam too.

Though he likes to call his poems “songs for the tone-deaf”, Sam has happily worked with musicians – country band The Warratahs, modern classical man Gareth Farr, the NZSO and alt. rocker David Kilgour, among others. Sam was special guest at two acclaimed Leonard Cohen concerts in 2009.
The same year he collaborated on an album with guitarist/singer David Kilgour, who transformed Sam’s poems into songs for the album Falling Debris.

In 1986, Sam was awarded a QSM – a “quiet sober man” he claimed. In 2010, he was further festooned with honour when he was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) for services to poetry.

Sam has enjoyed a burst of activity in recent years, publishing a new collection of poems Doubtless and the semi-autobiographical Backroads – charting a poet’s life , as well as a selection of James K Baxter poems.

Tell the story
Tell it true –
Charm it crazy