About Lynette
Vulnerability, Resistance & Resilience.
About Lynette Thorstensen
I have been writing poetry, intermittently but insistently, since my early twenties. Poetry has accompanied me across countries, careers, love, loss and landscapes — sometimes falling silent for years, then returning when there was something that could be said in no other way.
My poems have been published in the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand, including in respected literary journals such as PN Review, Landfall, takahē, Southerly and the Adelaide Literary Magazine. In 2024, two of my poems were selected for the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize anthology. My first bilingual collection, in French and English, is forthcoming.
I am also an exhibiting visual artist, working principally in large-format watercolour. For me, painting and poetry come from much the same impulse: to pay attention. To notice light, colour, movement and absence; to stay with an image or an emotion for long enough that something less obvious begins to emerge.
I was born in New Zealand, spent a significant part of my life in Australia, and have now made my home in France. I feel extraordinarily fortunate to live in an old stone house in the rural mountains of the Auvergne, surrounded by forests, fields, changing skies and the other species with whom we share this place. France is home. And yet Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand remain deeply within me — places I love and miss, whose oceans, forests, birds, heat, light and immense skies continue to surface unexpectedly in my work.
That same tension between vulnerability and resilience runs through my relationship with the natural world.
For much of my professional life I have worked for its protection — from my years with Greenpeace to decades of international work on sustainability and, later, serving as Chair of the Board of Fairtrade International. I have witnessed both the extraordinary vulnerability of the living world and its astonishing capacity for renewal. My environmental advocacy, my love of wild places and my conviction that nature is not something separate from us are inseparable from the poetry I write.
Perhaps inevitably, much of my poetry inhabits the territory between vulnerability, resistance and resilience.
My life has contained all three.
Divorce, the death of the father of my deeply loved sons while they were still young, and the experience of accompanying them through that immense loss have shaped me profoundly. So too has the very different gift of an abiding, longstanding second marriage: the discovery that love can return, deepen and endure.
These experiences have left me interested not simply in grief, but in what comes afterwards: how human beings absorb loss without being defined by it; how tenderness survives; how we continue to love; how we remain open to beauty and even joy.
But poetry also grows from much smaller moments: a bird at a window, an ancient tree, the particular blue of evening over the Auvergne, a remembered Australian beach, the smell of rain, a conversation, desire, motherhood, ageing, friendship, grief, love — and the strange persistence of hope.
For me, poetry begins in attention: looking closely enough at the world, and honestly enough at ourselves, for something previously hidden to reveal itself.
That is also at the heart of how I work with other poets.
If you are beginning to write, returning to poetry after years away, or already writing and wanting to take your work further, I offer individual mentoring and small-group poetry sessions. I am interested not in teaching anyone to sound like a particular kind of poet, but in helping you discover what is unmistakably yours — and then finding the courage, craft and precision to bring it fully onto the page.
If you would like to develop your own poetry with me, please read more about working together.
Book a conversation
Lynette would be delighted to discuss your vision and practice for your own poems and how to progress as a poet.