SARAH QUIGLEY is a New Zealand-born novelist and poet who lives in Berlin. She has a D. Phil from the University of Oxford. She has won many prizes for her poetry and short fiction, which have been published widely. Her new novel Fifty Days is published with Virago in May 2004.

Quigley comments: ‘A couple of years ago I went to the Frankfurt Bookfair, where I happened to meet an old classmate of mine from Bill Manhire’s creative writing course in Wellington. We had a long talk one night about how the world can be roughly divided into two types: “heart-breakers”, and those whose hearts are prone to be broken. The poem “Dinosaur Times” grew out of that conversation, and it deals with risk-taking and the strategies we develop in order to survive, both in life and in love.’

 

Poem: Dinosaur Times