Karyn Hay is an award-winning novelist and broadcaster: her debut novel Emerald Budgies won the New Zealand Society of Authors Hubert Church Best First Book Award in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2001. She was awarded a Frank Sargeson Fellowship in 2004; and is a literary advisor to the Frank Sargeson Trust, and mentor for the New Zealand Society of Authors. The March Of The Foxgloves was published in December 2016 and was a No.1 bestseller on the New Zealand Fiction list. Her new novel Winged Helmet, White Horse was published in November 2018 to critical acclaim.
Kate Camp described Emerald Budgies as ‘raw, thoughtful and very funny’. Chris Knox said it ‘was not for the queasy… Imagine 1980s Doris Lessing crossed with Bret Easton Ellis and you’re some way to imagining what this book reads like’. For Denis Welch it was, ‘A relentlessly bleak — if extremely funny — vision of modern life with no redemption whatsoever for anyone anywhere . . . There are times when Emerald Budgies makes Trainspotting look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm’.
The March of the Foxgloves, published in New Zealand in 2016, was historical fiction, set in 1893 in New Zealand, and was No. 1 on the New Zealand fiction charts for several months.
Dionne Christian, writing in the NZ Herald, called The March Of The Foxgloves ‘a funny, lively and energetic romp which delves into the underbelly of society’ and that Hay ‘has paid close attention to the settings – London, Auckland and Tauranga – period details and historical events’. Stephanie Jones found Hay ‘a sly and delightful wordsmith, a grand raconteur of the page, in whose hands historical fiction feels utterly current, even urgent’.
Her third novel, Winged Helmet, White Horse was published in New Zealand in 2018 with the NZ Listener calling Hay ‘a smart, gutsy writer … it’s impossible to read this book without hearing her trademark vocal delivery. She isn’t afraid of flawed characters or loose ends, and throws in plot twists you won’t see coming. Good at witty dialogue, she also takes a few comic and barbed pokes at middle-class life and the literary world’.
Links
Penguin Random House writer page
NZ Society of Authors member page
Radio NZ presenter bio page
NZ OnScreen bio page
NZ Herald interview on writing, background and Winged Helmet, White Horse (Nov, 2018)
YouTube: ‘The Cafe’ interview on Winged Helmet, White Horse (Nov, 2018)
