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Mark Pirie was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1974. He is a New Zealand poet, fiction writer, non-fiction writer, literary critic, publisher, editor and anthologist.
His poems have been published in India, New Zealand, Australia, Croatia, the US, Canada, Singapore, Iraq, China, Thailand, Germany, and the UK. In 1998 Otago University Press published his anthology of 'Generation X' New Zealand writing, The NeXt Wave.
In 1999 he wrote an MA thesis on the New Zealand poet and editor Louis Johnson at the University of Otago.
He was managing editor of, and co-edited, JAAM literary journal (New Zealand) from 1995 to 2005, and is the current managing editor of HeadworX Publishers, and the editor of broadsheet: new new zealand poetry. In 2003, Salt Publishing, Cambridge, England, published his new and selected poems, Gallery: A Selection.
From 2003-2004 he helped co-organise the Wellington International Poetry Festival, with Ron Riddell and Saray Torres. HeadworX published the first two anthologies of the festival. From 2003 to 2008 he co-organised the popular Winter Readings poetry series in Wellington with Michael O'Leary. The event returned in 2016.
He has co-edited (with Tim Jones) the prize-winning anthology of New Zealand Science Fiction poetry, Voyagers (Interactive Publications, Brisbane, 2009), and edited an anthology of railway poems, Rail Poems of New Zealand Aotearoa (Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa, 2010) and a cricket poetry anthology 'A Tingling Catch': A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009 (HeadworX, 2010), with a foreword by Don Neely. In 2017, he edited Boots: A Selection of Football Poetry 1890-2017, with a Foreword by former All White Michael Groom.
He helped co-organise the Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa (PANZA) in 2010 and edits the newsletter Poetry Notes.
A new selection of his poems Rock and Roll: Selected Poems in Five Sets appeared in 2016 published by Bareknuckle Books in Brisbane, Australia.
In 2018, he privately published a biography of his grandfather, Tom Lawn: Mystery Forward: A Life in Business and Rugby.
Photo of Mark Pirie above by John Girdlestone, copyright 2007