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THERE MUST BE FEW READERS OF JNZL WHO HAVE NOT BENEFITED in some way from Terry Sturm's commitment to the promotion and academic study of New Zealand literature. During his final years, while suffering from cancer, he continued to work on his long-term project, making a heroic effort to complete his literary biography of Alien Curnow. This was despite a further setback, when his computer and flash drive containing all the chapters he had written were stolen. They were not returned, but through the scanning of printouts and the recovery of email attachments sent to colleagues and friends he was eventually able to reconstruct his text. By the time he died, he had produced a full draft of 444,000 words.
Terence Laurie Sturm was born in Auckland of British, German, and Maori descent (Ngati Rakaipaka of Ngati Kahungunu). He grew up in Henderson, transferring from Henderson High to the sixth form at Auckland Grammar School and arriving at the University of Auckland with a National Junior Scholarship. He left with First Class Honors in English, the Fowlds Memorial Prize for the most distinguished student in the Faculty of Arts (he had won prizes in Latin and Greek, as well as English), and the New Zealand Postgraduate Scholarship and Eliot Davis Scholarship that took him to Trinity College, Cambridge. But the Cambridge English Department proved unhelpful over Terry's proposed thesis topic: he was determined to explore New Zealand and Australian poetry in relation to "Modern Poetry" in general, and when the eminent poet and critic Donald Davie- the only person who had been willing to act as supervisor- left for the United States, Terry, married by then to his first wife Helen, transferred to the University of Leeds, where Professor Norman Jeffares was introducing Commonwealth Literature Studies. Terry found Leeds much more congenial.
Having obtained his Leeds PhD, Terry was appointed to the University of Sydney English Department, under the headship of Gerry Wilkes. It was from Sydney that he prepared two volumes for Auckland University Press's New Zealand Fiction series of reprints, then under the general editorship of Bill Pearson: they were the Taranaki writer Frank S. Anthony's Follow the Call and Gus Tomlins, in which a Kiwi vernacular was used effectively for the first...