Christian Karlson "Karl" Stead (born 17 October 1932) is a New Zealand writer whose works include novels, poetry, short stories, and literary criticism. He is one of New Zealand's most well-known and internationally celebrated writers. Early life and education Stead was born in Auckland in 1932. He attended Mount Albert Grammar School. He has said that growing up he rarely read New Zealand writers: "I read a few New Zealand writers at school but mainly it was a British education so one read British writers really". Stead began writing poetry at about age 14 when he read a copy of the collected works of Rupert Brooke, sent by his sister's penpal in England. Stead graduated from the University of Auckland with a Bachelor of Arts in 1959, and earned his Masters of Arts the following year. At this time he and his wife were neighbours with short-story writer Frank Sargeson. Writer Janet Frame was living in a hut in Sargeson's garden, having recently been discharged after nine years in a mental hospital. Frame later wrote about this time in her memoir An Angel at My Table, and Stead covered the same period in his autobiographical novel All Visitors Ashore (1984). Academic and literary career Stead completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in 1961. From 1959 to 1986, Stead taught at the University of Auckland, becoming the Professor of English in 1968. In 1964, Stead published his first book, The New Poetic (1964), based on his PhD study of W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and the Georgian poets. It went on to sell over 100,000 copies. His first book of poems, Whether the Will Is Free: Poems 1954–62, was published in the same year. Stead's first novel, Smith's Dream, about a war similar to the Vietnam War in New Zealand, was published in 1971. Stead was an opponent of the Vietnam War. Smith's Dream provided the basis for the film Sleeping Dogs, starring Sam Neill, which became the first New Zealand film released in the United States. In the 1980s, Stead's writings about Māori rights and feminism became the subject of some criticism. For example, in an article published in the London Review of Books in December 1986, he wrote that the representation of New Zealand history by Witi Ihimaera in his novel The Matriarch (1986) was inaccurate "insofar as it ascribes conscious and malicious intent to