Our judge 2025

Ruby Solly

Ruby Solly is a poet who hails from Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, and Kāti Māmoe. She has two books of poetry under THWUP, ‘Tōku Pāpā’ (2020) and ‘The Artist’ (2023). She has had poetry published in Aotearoa, America, Australia, and Antarctica. She also works as a taonga pūoro practitioner, composer and musician, and as a result has had her poems used for opera, popular music, jazz, and other genres. She is currently working on turning her PhD into a poem novel, in order to help whānau to access mātauranga on the use of taonga pūoro within hauora; health and healing.

Photo by Ebony Lamb

Ruby’s very special connection with the National Schools Poetry Award

In 2012 and 2013, I was lucky enough to be a finalist in the Schools Poetry Award. It was the first time I’d ever even been on a plane, and I often think about how when Katie picked me up from the airport I must have seemed like a real small-town hick. I couldn’t believe that people just sat on the plane and read their books, or looked bored. I was glued to the window the entire time looking out at te ika-a-Maui beneath me, with all the stories of my childhood under the korowai aroha of Te Arawa and Tuwharetoa coming to life. I was ecstatic by the time I got off the plane, and remained so for the rest of the trip. I remember Hinemoana Baker, a Kāi Tahu and Takataapui poet, taking our workshop. Which gave me this spark of realisation that my life could grow to be very different from what it had been so far. Poetry to me is a lot like that aeroplane trip. It’s being able to look from a different angle, to see from above how an entire story will play out. But as a reader, it’s being able to understand that what you are experiencing is incredible, it’s being able to keep looking out the window and appreciating each detail, even when you don’t know the landscape. Needless to say, returning to the Schools Poetry Award as a judge felt like an important full circle moment for me, and I tried my very best to keep my eyes on the landscape the entire flight.

Ruby Solly’s finalist entry in 2012, and in 2013.

Read Ruby Solly’s Judge’s Report for 2025.

Read last year’s Judge’s Report 2024
Read reports from our previous judges.