Peter Dane

Peter Dane was born in Berlin, Germany in 1921 to a Jewish mother and a German father. He fled to England in the 1930s and was interned as an enemy alien in both England and Australia before attending London University. Dane graduated in 1952 and spent seven years in Kampala, Uganda, where he taught at Makerere University before moving to Auckland, New Zealand in 1961. From 1961 to 1986, Dane was a professor of English at Auckland University. He was also a poet and an environmental activist. His first poetry collection, Twenty-four Sonnets, was published in 1982, and his final poetry collection, The Albatross is Dead: Sixty Sonnets, was published in 2000. Dane died at Jacks Bay, New Zealand on July 29, 2016.