22 Facts About Iain Lonie

Iain Malcolm Lonie was a British-born New Zealand poet and a historian of ancient Greek medicine.

Iain Lonie read classics at the University of Cambridge, lectured at universities in both Australia and New Zealand, worked as a research fellow for the Wellcome Trust, and wrote a definitive textbook on the Hippocratic texts On Generation, On the Nature of the Child and Diseases IV.

Iain Lonie's poems received little critical attention during his lifetime, but in 2015 the publication of his collected works by New Zealand poet and editor David Howard sparked renewed interest in his work.

Iain Lonie was born in the town of March, Cambridgeshire, and moved to Gisborne in New Zealand with his family in 1942.

Iain Lonie completed a Bachelor of Arts in classics at the University of Otago in 1954, and went on to read classics King's College, Cambridge, specialising in ancient philosophy and the history of medicine.

Iain Lonie graduated from Cambridge in 1956 with a first-class honours degree and a distinction in ancient philosophy.

Iain Lonie married Jean Andrews in 1951, a science student he met at Carrington Hall.

In 1956, Iain Lonie was appointed as a lecturer in classics at the University of New England, New South Wales.

In 1970 Iain Lonie was promoted to Assistant Professor, and in 1973 he and Judith had a son.

In 1974 Iain Lonie resigned from his university post to become a deckhand on the Otago Harbour Board dredge, seemingly as a result of an attack of depression, from which Iain Lonie suffered throughout his life.

Iain Lonie became an editor for a printing firm and briefly for the Otago University Press.

Iain Lonie edited a collection of Judith's poetry, The Remembering of the Elements, which was published in 1984.

Iain Lonie was described after his death as "one of the best and most innovative modern historians of classical medicine".

Iain Lonie wrote extensively on the Hippocratic Corpus and ancient Greek medicine.

The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature records that Iain Lonie was bothered by the "lack of recognition" of his work within the New Zealand literary world, as he hoped to be remembered for his work as a poet rather than as an academic.

Iain Lonie's oldest daughter, Bridie Iain Lonie, is an artist and academic.

Iain Lonie was the Head of School at the Dunedin School of Art until her retirement in 2022.

In 2015, the Otago University Press published A Place to Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie, edited by David Howard.

Iain Lonie brought to his poetry the precision and clarity and intellectual force of a gifted classical scholar.

Iain Lonie was patiently indifferent to passing fashions, with his own more enduring touchstones.

Iain Lonie explored a private bereavement, and bereavement's essential privacy, while his fellow poets were hastening to map their race and gender onto the body politic.

Iain Lonie's virtues were not those which dominated New Zealand poetry in those decades.