(1837-1899), a Congregational missionary working in Damascus, scholar and author, and his wife Ann (d.1877), née McKee, daughter of the Rev.

[1] David Wright was born while his parents were home on furlough and was left with a grandmother (Rebecca McKee) until he was seven years old.

Wright married Elizabeth Couper at Dunedin on 3 August 1899; a son David was born in 1900, but the marriage failed.

Wright was editor of the Red Page of The Bulletin 1916–1926[1] and encouraged many of the rising writers of the time, and continued to do a large amount of writing himself in both prose and verse.

[2] As Wright grew older his mind turned more and more to the country of his birth, he published his most important volume, An Irish Heart (1918).

It is not a question of individual words or phrases, but rather of a man steeping himself in the modern Irish school of poetry, and with all the skill of his practised craftsmanship reproducing its spirit in another land.