Her first book of poems Salt Water Creek was published in London and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection in 2003. She won a Canterbury History Foundation Award in 2007 and wrote Feeling for Daylight: The Photographs of Jack Adamson, a non-fiction biography published by the South Canterbury Museum. Her writing has been widely anthologised. Rhian Gallagher won the New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry in 2012 for her second collection Shift.