Internationally renowned poet Fleur Adcock is to receive an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington. "Fleur is unquestionably one of our finest expatriate writers, in the tradition of Katherine Mansfield, Janet Frame, Robin Hyde, and Dan Davin," said Vice-Chancellor Professor Pat Walsh. "While she is best known for her poetry, which has been described as 'richly intelligent', she has also found success as translator, editor, musical collaborator and teacher."Internationally renowned poet Fleur Adcock is to receive an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington. "Fleur is unquestionably one of our finest expatriate writers, in the tradition of Katherine Mansfield, Janet Frame, Robin Hyde, and Dan Davin," said Vice-Chancellor Professor Pat Walsh. "While she is best known for her poetry, which has been described as 'richly intelligent', she has also found success as translator, editor, musical collaborator and teacher."Adcock will receive the honorary Doctorate of Literature at the graduation ceremony for the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences in Wellington on 11 December.

Born in 1934, Fleur Adcock spent the war years growing up in England, returning to New Zealand in 1947. A student at Victoria from 1951-1955, she gained a Bachelor (1954), and Master of Arts (1956) in Classics. Her first published poems appeared in the University's student newspaper Salient in 1952.

Adcock has had numerous collections of poetry published, her first being The Eye of the Hurricane in 1964, as well as two collections - Selected Poems (1983) and Poems 1960-2000 (2000). She has also been the editor of several anthologies.

She won her first recognition as a poet by winning the Festival of Wellington Poetry Award in 1961, and although she moved to England in 1963, she continued to receive recognition and acclaim in New Zealand.

Other awards include the New Zealand State Literary Fund Award for Achievement in 1964, the Jesse MacKay Prize in 1968 and again in 1972, and the Buckland Award, for the year's outstanding work of literature, in both 1968 and 1979. In 1984 Adcock received the New Zealand National Book Award.

The accolades continued in England. In 1976 she was granted a Cholmondeley Award for Poets which recognised her achievement in, and contribution to, poetry. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and won an Arts Council Writers' Award four years later. This was followed by an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1996, and being made an Honorary Fellow of the English Association in 2001.

In 2006, Adcock was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, only the second New Zealander to win the award, the late Allen Curnow being the first in 1989; past recipients include W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Stevie Smith. On conferring the Medal, the statement from Buckingham Palace cited the "widespread critical acclaim" her volume Poems 1960-2000 had received.

In the early 1980s, Adcock had several collaborations with New Zealand composer Gillian Whitehead, herself the holder of an honorary doctorate from Victoria. She has made several translations of Romanian and medieval Latin poems, delivered talks on poetry for the BBC, and served in several fellowship positions at English universities. Currently she is an occasional tutor in advanced poetry at the Arvon Foundation for Writing.

In recent years she has taken a keen interest in the global warming debate, and last year made one of her poems, "A Rose Tree", available for an Oxfam CD as part of the Poets for Oxfam group.

30/7/07