Education
She was educated at Columba College in Dunedin and University of Otago (Master"s with first-class Honours in 1971).
She was educated at Columba College in Dunedin and University of Otago (Master"s with first-class Honours in 1971).
McQueen"s family moved to New Zealand when she was four. Awarded honorary Doctorate in Literature by University of Otago in 2008. A poet and artist, she has published fourteen collections, including a Civil Defense, of her poetry.
In 2009 she was named New Zealand Poet Laureate.
Other awards include: New Zealand Book Award for Poetry 1983, 1989 and 1991. Robert Burns Fellowship at Otago University 1985 & 1986.
Fulbright Visiting Writer’s Fellowship 1985. Inaugural Australia-New Zealand Writer’s Exchange Fellowship 1987.
Goethe Institute Scholarship to Berlin 1988.
New Zealand Queen Elizabeth Arts Council Scholarship in Letters 1992. Her most recent works are a Civil Defense of McQueen reading her poems ("A Wind Harp", from Otago University Press), a 2010 volume of new poems and drawings "The Radio Room" (Otago University Press), "Edwin"s Egg", a poetic novella (2014, Otago University Press), "An Island", a letterpress edition (2014, Mirrorcity Press) and In a Slant Light, a poet"s memoir (2016, Otago University Press). Recent exhibitions of her art work include "Picture Poem", works by Cilla McQueen and Joanna Paul, at the Hocken Library, Dunedin, 2015 and an exhibition of intuitive musical scores, "What Happens", at the Brett McDowell Gallery, Dunedin, 2015.
Cilla McQueen"s poems include themes of homeland and loss, indigeneity, colonisation and displacement.
She writes as a descendant of the colonised on Street Kilda in the Hebrides. Her writing also reflects her engagement with the history and present reality of the Maori people of Murihiku.