My name is Erin Donohue. I am a writer and editor living in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. I write poetry, fiction, essays and everything in between.
My book Because Everything Is Right but Everything Is Wrong (Escalator Press, 2017) was a finalist in two categories in the 2018 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults and it centres around mental illness, high school and being a teen with the whole world stretched out in front of you.
I write about illness, perception, disability, love, body image and fear. I am currently working on a poetry collection in which I confront and catalogue what it means to be mentally ill and what it could mean to, possibly, not be.
I have been featured in the Auckland Writers Festival, the Nelson Readers and Writers Festival and Verb in Wellington. My work has been published in Landfall, The Spinoff, Shit You Should Care About and Starling. Because Everything Is Right but Everything Is Wrong has been studied in high school English classes around the country and my poem Slideshow was included in the 2022 NCEA level one nationwide English exam.
I like reading novels about repressed, stoic middle-aged men confronting their pasts in the small towns they grew up in and contemplative creative non-fiction in which women dissect our society and question their place in it.
I live in my grandparents old house in Porirua – where my mum was a teen girl – and where I spent much of my childhood. We have too much art and I see the ocean every day. I am regularly blown away by the ordinary beauty of my life.
I like taking pictures of the clouds, therapy, barbershop and my cat Maura, who I named after a Love Island contestant. I am my most authentic self when I am riding my moped on a sunny day or swimming in the sea, in any weather.
