Preeminent literary magazine Sport has folded after over 30 years in the New Zealand literary scene. Founder Fergus Barrowman joined Kim Hill to talk about the journey.
Fergus Barrowman Photo: Supplied/Ebony Lamb
Sport was founded by writers Damien Wilkins, Elizabeth Knox, Nigel Cox and their Victoria University Press (VUP) publisher Fergus Barrowman in 1988.
Dedicated to excellence in new writing, it published many of our most well-known authors early in their careers, from Emily Perkins and Eleanor Catton to recent national award winners Pip Adam, Tayi Tibble and Airini Beautrais. It has also featured the work of many fine New Zealand photographic artists.
Sport folded in 2020 as the pandemic hit and VUP have now published an anthology of the magazine’s latter years, A Game of Two Halves: The Best of Sport 2005-2019, edited by Barrowman.
'Sport needed to be a passive magazine' - Listen to Kim Hill's full interview with Fergus Barrowman
Barrowman told Kim Hill the magazine was legendarily conceived in Damien Wilkins' yellow Ford Escort in the spring of 1988.
"It just naturally arose as an idea," he said. "And I think by the time we got to wherever we were going, we were pretty sure we were going to do it."
Sport arose to fill a gap in the market, while New Zealand publishing was experiencing something of a golden age.
"I was meeting lots of great young writers, reading thei work. VUP being small we couldn't publish all of it, so Sport was a way of getting in early."
Despite the close relationship with VUP, Barrowman kept Sport "vigourously separate", working on it during weekends.
"But without the exposure to writers, the flow of writers, and the contacts I had with VUP, it would have been much harder to do," he said.
"And it worked in the other way too, it attracted a lot of young writers and it gave VUP access to a kind of punk publishing thing that you can't do as a university press, where you have to be slower and more cautious."
Sport also published the early work of Barbara Anderson, who only began writing in her 50s.
"It was very lucky for me in my professional life that I had that relationship with Barbara early, because it taught me that young is actually the wrong word to use when you're talking about new writers, because writers emerge at any stage at life," he said.
"And what Barbara had was sixty years of life experience at the same time as she was discovering herself as a writer, so she had all of that acceleration and the experience built in."
The Sport editors photographed in 1988, Clockwise from left: Nigel Cox, Fergus Barrowman, Damien Wilkins and Elizabeth Knox. Photo: Supplied
The publication of Sport coincided with an exciting moment in New Zealand publishing - which Barrowman said might have something to do with Roger Douglas.
"It was the neoliberal opening up of the New Zealand economy, which has caused enormous amounts of harm that we're still suffering from in the social fabric," he said. "But for someone like a young publisher living in Central Wellington, it was a good time.
"Books came in from overseas and you could get books published in New Zealand, so the number of New Zealand fiction titles went from under ten per year at the beginning of the 80s to about 50 per year by the end of the 80s."
In contrast to other magazines like Landfall, Sport did not publish reviews - rather, it focused on what was actually happening in the literary world.
"I came to the view that Sport needed to be a passive magazine, I didn't have any of the answers, I wanted to float the magazine there to see what was happening," Barrowman said.
"And what was happening was poetry and fiction in those years. In recent years, the rise of the personal essay has been really interesting and there's been more of that in Sport in recent years."
While Sport had nearly folded a couple of times in the past, the Covid-19 pandemic helped the editors realise it was time to end things.
"We just got to the point where it was too late to start another Sport. And rather than lamely do one that's a year late, why not just say it's over now.
"We can put all of that energy into some of the great developments at VUP and I can think about other things."