Rangi Faith was born in Timaru and educated at Temuka Primary School and Temuka High School where he was head boy in 1967. He studied at the University of Canterbury and graduated with a B.A. in Sociology in 1972. Since 1973 he has been teaching in primary schools in North Canterbury and the West Coast and is currently teaching at Ashgrove School, Rangiora.
Faith has been writing and publishing poetry since the late 1960s; he has published two collections of his own poetry and one anthology of thirty-two New Zealand poets. He has also worked as a poetry reviewer for the Press.
Faith has received various awards and grants for his poetry. He was third in the “Save Aramoana Poetry Competition” in October 1980 and received a New Zealand Literary Fund Writing Grant to assist in completing his collection of poetry Unfinished Crossword in 1990. In 1991 he was short listed for a PEN First Book Award and in 1993 was a recipient of a Te Atairangikaahu Commemorative Award (Co-winner) in Poetry. Faith received a Creative New Zealand Writing Grant for Rivers Without Eels in 2000 and a Creative New Zealand Writing Grant in 2002-3.
Faith was an Assessor for the Creative New Zealand Grants First Funding Round in 1997-98. He was Guest Poet at the May 1998 meeting of the Canterbury Poets’ Collective with Bernadette Hall and Michael Harlow, and was performing poet at “Aukaha Kia Kaha”, the inaugural Kai Tahu Arts festival at Dunedin, September 29 – October 1, 2000. He was part of performance poetry at The Space in Wellington in September 2001 with Roma Potiki, Hone Tuwhare, Aroha Harris, Arapera Blank and Anton Blank. He conducted poetry workshops in Rangiora in August-September 2003 and he read his work at the Waimakariri Arts Council Literary Group Meeting in October 2003. In 2004 he was judge of the Waimakariri Poetry Competition.
His poems have appeared in Islands, Landfall, Pilgrims, Poetry New Zealand, The Listener, Tu Tangata, Climate, Pacific Quarterly Moana, The Visionary, Manoa, and Southern Ocean Review. His poem “Passage of Time” from Rivers Without Eels was used in the Sixth Form external English Examination, November 3 2003. His poetry was featured on a Special Guest page in the online magazine Blackmail Press 6, March 2003 at http://nzpoetsonline.homestead.com
Faith completed a course in Freelance Journalism with the New Zealand Institute of Business Studies and has published articles in New Zealand Trout Fisher from 2003-2004.
"Conversation with a Moahunter (2005) was published by Steele Roberts Publishers, Wellington. Spoonbill 101 (2014) was published by Puriri Press, Auckland.
Faith had a poem included in Shards of Silver (Steele Roberts, 2006), a book investigating the interplay between photography and poetry.
Faith’s preoccupation is with what Tom Weston has called 'the unsettled scores of a colonial history'. As a poet Faith engages with both the Maori and the European experiences of landscape and language. The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature writes that Faith’s poems 'draw strength from an unfamiliar point of view, [that] the poet himself is modestly reticent and undogmatic.'
In addition to being a writer, Faith is also an editor. In Dangerous Landscapes: An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry (1994), Faith created a collection of poetry for young adults that explores the issues that surround both Maori and European notions of history and identity. The collection also addresses issues of writing as craft.
Since 1988 Faith has lived in Rangiora where he continues to write and teach."
Biographical sources
- Correspondence from Rangi Faith 8 June 1998, 29 April, 6 May 2004 and 30 Sept. 2005.
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http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/Writers/Profiles/Faith,%20Rangi 7 September 2016