Roger John Horrocks (born 4 June 1941) is a New Zealand writer, film-maker, educator and cultural activist. Biography Horrocks was born in the Auckland suburb of Mount Albert on 4 June 1941, the son of Jack Horrocks and Edith Barbara Horrocks (née Rhodes). Majoring in English, he completed a BA (1962), MA First Class Honours (1963), and PhD (1976) from the University of Auckland. His doctoral thesis, supervised by C. K. Stead, was titled Mosaic: a study of juxtaposition in literature, as an approach to Pound's Cantos and similar modern poems. He also studied for two years with Allen Tate at the University of Minnesota (1964–65) and one year with Thom Gunn at the University of California, Berkeley (1966). In 1973, receiving a Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, he studied with Robert Creeley at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1964 he married Eleanor Seguin. Their daughter, Simone Horrocks, is a film director, and Dylan Horrocks is a cartoonist and writer. His second marriage, in 1979, was to Shirley Heim (née Spitz), herself a documentary filmmaker, and he became stepfather to Steve and Tony Heim. He taught at the University of Auckland from 1967 to 2004, and on his retirement became an emeritus professor. Honours and awards In the 2005 New Year Honours, Horrocks was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to the film and television industries. Other awards include a Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Auckland in 1998, a “10K Award” from the Broadcasting Commission (NZ On Air) in 2002 for services to broadcasting, and an Industry Mentor Award at the first New Zealand Scriptwriters Awards in 2010. Also, in 2014 he received a New Zealand History Research Trust Fund Award, and in 2015 a Michael King Centre Residency. In 2019 the Royal Society of New Zealand awarded him its Pou Aronui Prize for his lifetime contribution to the Humanities. The Royal Society described him as “a champion of New Zealand culture, particularly New Zealand’s film and television industries, as well as literature and the visual arts.” Educational work Horrocks was one of the New Zealand pioneers of the academic study of film and television. He taught Film Studies in adult education courses from 1967, then a University of Auckland course at graduate level from 1975. His teaching was timely because a New Zealand film