Russell Haley (1934 – 4 July 2016) was a New Zealand poet, short story writer and novelist.
Born in Yorkshire, he and his wife emigrated to Australia in 1961 and then to New Zealand in 1966, where he lived the rest of his life.
[5] In 1968, New Zealand composer Jack Body set Haley's poem "Turtle Time" to music.
[3][9] Peter Simpson described it as a "sequence of honest and well crafted poems, an unexpected development from a poet better known for the flash and dazzle of surrealistic word games".
[11] In the same year, poet C. K. Stead jokingly referred to Haley in a sonnet as "probably / the best Yorkshire surrealist / writing in New Zealand".
A review by writer Heather McPherson described it as "presenting a soft-edged reality where fantasy and perception blur and time and space may shift arbitrarily"; she concluded that "originality and a kind of intelligence secure enough to tilt the universe make this book an imaginative interior trip".
[17] In reviewing The Settlement, Owen Marshall noted it had a similar theme to Haley's previous short stories about "the fallibility of the real"; although finding that the style of the novel was "not always convincing", he concluded that it "is a New Zealand novel of ideas which has relevance and provokes thought long after the final page is reached".