The award was presented to Turner by Arts, Culture and Heritage Minister Chris Finlayson at the 2010 New Zealand Post Book Awards in Auckland.
The Oturehua-based biographer, essayist, poet and conservationist received the award for his collection, Just This.
The award was an honour, a reward for persistence, and came with a monetary prize that meant a great deal for a writer in the poetry genre, Turner said.
"I've been second several times," he said late last night from Auckland, shortly after winning the prize.
"For someone such as me, living the way I do, any money means a great deal.
"It's an honour to have won it. It's not to be sneezed at."
Judge Elizabeth Smither described the book as "a life's work in its reach, its depth and its deceptive plainness of surface".
"Just This dares to ask the profoundest questions about place and human existence, how we live now and how we hand the world on," she said.
"It is dangerous poetry, because it addresses ethics but, at the same time, it is leavened with a sweet and sly self-awareness as it searches for something you can have faith in, swear by. The journey from the first poem to the last is a revelation."
In a good year for Otago poets, the runner-up was Alexandra poet and 2009 University of Otago Robert Burns Fellow Michael Harlow, for his collection The Tram Conductor's Blue Cap.
The book of the year award was presented to historian Dame Judith Binney, for her account of Tuhoe's quest for self-government, Encircled Lands.
The judges said the winning work would "profoundly change our understanding of our shared history".
The book of the year winner received $15,000, while the winners of the four category awards each received $10,000 and the People's Choice Award winner $5000.
The judges were Dunedin natural history writer Neville Peat, author and editor Stephen Stratford, poet and novelist Elizabeth Smither, writer and educationalist Charmaine Pountney and writer and historian Paul Diamond.
TOP OF THE PILE
• Book of the Year: Encircled Lands: Te Urewera, 1820-1921 by Dame Judith Binney (Bridget Williams Books).
• General Non-fiction: Encircled Lands: Te Urewera, 1820-1921 by Dame Judith Binney (Bridget Williams Books).
• Fiction: As the Earth Turns Silver by Alison Wong (Penguin Group NZ).
• Poetry: Just This by Brian Turner (Victoria University Press).
• Illustrated Non-fiction: Go Fish: Recipes and stories from the New Zealand Coast by Al Brown (Random House NZ).
• People's Choice: Go Fish: Recipes and stories from the New Zealand Coast by Al Brown (Random House NZ).
