Biographer Deborah Shepard wins Ripiro Beach residency

A serendipitous link between Ripiro Beach and the poet whose biography she’s writing encouraged memoirist and biographer Deborah Shepard to apply for the University of Auckland’s Ripiro Beach Non-Fiction Writing Residency.

As this year’s winner, Shepard will spend two weeks at the beach (also known as Baylys) in Northland where she’ll work on her biography of Netherlands-born poet Riemke Ensing, who at 87, has just published a new anthology of poems, Blue is a Cracked Vase in Memory: POEMS 2000-2025 (Cold Hub Press, 2026).

The collection includes Ensing’s earlier collections Storm Warning, O Lucky Man and If Only, along with 60 new and uncollected poems, and “reveal her to be still working at the height of her powers after nearly seven decades of writing,” says Shepard.

Ensing was also a lecturer in the English department at the University for more than three decades, retiring in 1999.

Shepard says a friend suggested she apply, as an alumni, for the residency, unaware at the time of the relevance to her project.

“In 1951, at the age of 12, Riemke and her parents Hendrik and Jeltje Ensing, and siblings Theo and Astrid, emigrated from the Netherlands to settle in Aotearoa. They were leaving behind family and their spacious apartment in the historic city of Groningen to journey to an unknown country at the bottom of the world.”

On arrival in Auckland, they were driven north, in Ensing’s words, “a six-hour journey over metal roads,” to the farm of their sponsors in rural Turiwiri, just south of Dargaville, arriving in the night to a rustic two-roomed cottage that had “mice in the oven and worms in the tap”.

Ensing described the feeling as “a culture shock from here to yesterday, “and one she never got over”.

“And yet,” says Shepard, “the impact of this major upheaval on Riemke’s psyche is perhaps what propelled her journey into literature where she wrote to make sense of ‘the fact of being a migrant’.”

Riemke described her first major work on the topic, the long poem Topographies (1984), as an ‘attempt to piece together both the past and the present, the here with the there, connecting history, myth, and the fragmented details of two small parcels of earth on different sides of the world.”

Ripiro Beach itself, Shepard says, is a particularly evocative setting for her residency.

“The Ensing family were good swimmers. Every Dutch child learned to swim in the Netherlands because of the ever-present risk of falling into canals. The first time they swam in the sea was at Ripiro Beach. As new arrivals, they were unaware of the strong currents, and their father was caught in a rip and swept out to sea. Fortunately, Hendrik was a strong swimmer and was able to swim back in on the tide.”

Shepard is delighted to be this year’s resident.

“I appreciate the support of writer Caroline Barron who established the award, Jeremy Barron and Associate Professor Paula Morris, director of the Master of Creative Writing programme, and I’m really looking forward to writing in what appears to be a most attractive and comfortable bach provided by the Barrons.”

Ripiro Beach is also near the significant sites of Ensing’s early years in Dargaville (1951-1961) before she left for Ardmore Teachers’ College.

“The residency will offer time to follow in her footsteps and absorb the environs around the Dutch prefabricated house they shipped with them, still standing in Liverpool Street, Mangawhare, Dargaville,” says Shepard, who plans to retrace the route Ensing followed along the northern Wairoa river and through the town, “attuning to the historic reverberations and visualising her presence there”.

“In the process, I hope to gain a deeper understanding of all the factors that shaped the nascent poet and later flowed into her outstanding poems on migration.”

Shepard is particularly relishing “a decent tract of time, free of distraction” to move the project forward.

“I’ll use the fortnight to work on a chapter of the biography that opens on Riemke’s 2003 collection Storm Warning. These poems are set on a series of west coast beaches, from Anawhata in the south to the mouth of the Kaipara Harbour in the north.”

She also plans to make a trip to Pouto, the location of Ensing’s poem ‘Kaipara’ to “experience the elemental power of the place”.

“While I’m there, I’ll recite the poem into the sea air and send it down the coast to Riemke.”

About Deborah Shepard
Deborah Shepard is a biographer, oral historian and teacher of memoir. Four of her books have examined aspects of New Zealand art history, film history and literature through the life and work of major cultural practitioners: Reframing Women: a history of New Zealand film (Harper Collins, 2000), Between the Lives: Partners in Art (AUP 2005), Her Life’s Work (AUP 2009) and The Writing Life: Twelve New Zealand Authors (MUP 2018).

About the Ripiro Beach residency
The University of Auckland Ripiro Beach Non-Fiction Writing Residency is open to University alumni, takes place for two weeks between July and September each year and includes accommodation at the Barron family bach at Ripiro Beach. It also includes a $1,500 stipend funded by the Barron Family and the Masters of Creative Writing Alumni Fund.

Due to the high quality of submissions this year, the selection panel decided to award an additional shorter residency to emerging writer Anne Marie Basquin, as well as a $500 stipend. The inaugural recipient was honorary Associate Professor of Sociology Avril Bell.