Sam Hunt is a professional poet, writing and touring his work through New Zealand and beyond for the last 40 years or so. His new book, Chords (& other poems) will be published mid-2011, coinciding with the national release of the feature documentary film Sam Hunt: Purple Balloon & Other Stories..

He was born in 1946, at Castor Bay, Auckland It was a coastal childhood filled with poems. Both parents and their colourful circle of family and friends often had poems on their lips – usually told from memory. The Catholic Mass made its mark on Sam too.

Though he likes to call his poems “songs for the tone-deaf”, Sam has happily worked with musicians – country band The Warratahs, modern classical man Gareth Farr, the NZSO and alt. rocker David Kilgour, among others. Sam was special guest at two acclaimed Leonard Cohen concerts in 2009.

The same year he collaborated on an album with guitarist/singer David Kilgour, who transformed Sam’s poems into songs for the album Falling Debris. There is another album in the works.

In 1986, Sam was awarded a QSM – a “quiet sober man” he claimed. In 2010, he was further festooned with honour when he was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) for services to poetry.

After a long absence from print, Sam has enjoyed a burst of activity in recent years, publishing a new collection of poems Doubtless and the semi-autobiographical Backroads – charting a poet’s life with Craig Potton Publishers, as well as a selection of James K Baxter poems for AUP.

And so it goes, as Sam says:

Tell the story
Tell it true –
Charm it crazy.