Anthony Byrt

Anthony Byrt is an award-winning New Zealand author, critic and journalist. He has written art criticism for publications including Artforum, NZ Listener and Metro, and has published two major books. This Model World: Travels to the Edge of Contemporary Art (AUP, 2016), a finalist in the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, was described as ‘breathtaking’ and a book that ‘enlightens and provokes’ (NZ Listener). The Mirror Steamed Over: Love and Pop in London, 1962 (AUP, 2020), longlisted for the Ockhams, was ‘a wonderfully written, affecting account of the personalities and layered complexities of life in and around the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s’ according to Professor Thomas Crow from NYU; Professor Matt Saunders from Harvard wrote that Byrt has ‘a special talent for zooming into a milieu’. Byrt’s whakapapa ties him to Ngāti Kahu ki Whaingaroa and the Dalmation gumdiggers who settled later in Te Tai Tokerau. He currently lives in Naarm/Melbourne with his family and has recently published his first novel, Dying Days (Affirm Press).