'Not a lot' might be one obvious retort to the proposition ‘What Rudyard Kipling can do for you’. Poet and Kipling biographer Harry Ricketts sees it differently. For him, the later Kipling in particular can often provide helpful, hard-won, entertaining guidance. He can help us appreciate the importance of both independence and community. He can help us to engage with the continual oddity and gullibility of human nature, He can help us see, think and imagine beyond our own culture. He can, perhaps above all, help us create ‘a bulkhead ’twixt Despair and the Edge of Nothing’.

Based in Wellington, Harry is a poet, biographer, editor, anthologist, critic and scholar. He has written The Unforgiving Minute, a biography of Rudyard Kipling and Strange Meetings, a group-biography of a dozen WW1 poets. He is now Emeritus Professor in the English Programme at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington where he continues to teach a second-year course in Creative Nonfiction at the International Institute of Modern Letters. He has a memoir coming out this year, and a new collection of poems next year.