Maggie Rainey-Smith is a novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist and book reviewer. She has published work in journals and anthologies including Landfall, Sport, NZ Listener, The 4th Floor Literary Journal, New Zealand Books, Radio New Zealand and Essential New Zealand Poems. In 2013, she was joint runner-up for the Landfall essay prize.

Her first novel About Turns, (Random House, 2005), was the first New Zealand novel to be made a ‘Guaranteed Great Read’. Reviewing About Turns, Kimberly Bartlett in the Herald on Sunday wrote: ‘Rainey-Smith frees herself from the constraints of a great deal of women’s fiction by steering away from romantic love. Instead, she explores themes of friendship, infidelity, literature and class in New Zealand’.

About Turbulence, her second novel (Random House, 2007), John McCrystal, on Radio NZ, Nine to Noon, stated that ‘a book that is written from the male perspective by a woman… it takes balls.  She makes generalisations about what it is to be a man that should really be insulting but they’re too accurate to really take issue with’.

Of her third novel Daughters of Messene, (Makaro Press, 2015) Graham Beattie wrote it is ‘a totally enchanting, new, New Zealand novel – don’t miss this one’, while a review in the Listener said, ‘Daughters of Messene is a deftly written, moving exploration of female bonds, courage and loss’. The latest publication of Daughters of Messene, was translated into Greek in 2019.

Maggie currently works for MCLaSS teaching ESOL Workplace English to migrants and refugees, and spent three months in Siem Reap as a volunteer teacher. She has served as Chair of NZSA Wellington, and on the Randell Cottage Committee. She is a current committee member of the Wellington Writers Walk.

Formica (Cuba Press, 2022) is Maggie’s first poetry collection and begins in the 1950s at the Formica family kitchen table, then follows her as she makes her way in the world – working as a typist, doing her OE, becoming a wife, a mother and grandmother. Maggie nods to the lives of all women of her generation – too often defined by their fertility and kitchen appliances – with poems about abiding friendships, granddaughters, travel, sex and the joy of words. Formica has made it twice so far onto the Neilson bestseller list.

Maggie has recently co-edited, along with Linda Burgess, the celebration anthology Room To Write: 20 Years of Randell Cottage Writers, commissioned by the Randell Cottage Writers Trust. Forty previous writers in residence from France and Aotearoa New Zealand explore the idea of ‘looking back’. All the work is presented in both English and French, with introductory essays by Dame Fiona Kidman and Beverley Randell Price.

 

Links

Visit Maggie’s website

Read Maggie’s blog

Maggie on Twitter and Facebook

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Random House author page

Mākaro Press author page

ANZL review of Formica (Dec, 2022)

Wellington City Library podcast interview with Tanya Aschcroft discussing Formica, Maggie’s life, and her writing career – originally aired on Caffeine and Aspirin Access Radio (March, 2022)

Radio NZ: Maggie discusses Formica on ‘Standing Room Only’ (March, 2022)

Landfall review of Daughters of Messene (May, 2016)

NZ Listener review of Daughters of Messene (Dec, 2015)