Academy of New Zealand Literature

Dunedin writer Paddy Richardson is a prolific fiction author. To date she has published two collections of short stories, Choices (Hard Echo Press, 1986), If We Were Lebanese (Steele Roberts, 2003), and eight novels, The Company of a Daughter (Steele Roberts, 2000), A Year to Learn a Woman (Penguin, 2008), Hunting Blind (Penguin, 2010), Traces of Red (Penguin, 2011), Cross Fingers (Hachette, 2013) Swimming in the Dark (Upstart Press, 2014) , Through the Lonesome Dark (Upstart press, May 2017) and By the Green of the Spring (Quentin Wilson, 2022). Four of the last six have been finalists in the Ngaio Marsh Award. Paddy has been awarded three Creative New Zealand Awards, the University of Otago Burns Fellowship (1997), the Beatson Fellowship (2007), and the James Wallace Arts Trust Residency Award (2011). Her work had been published in Australia (MacMillans), and translated and published in Germany (Droemer Knaur). Although she has turned to psychological thriller writing more recently, her first novel was a saga of five generations of New Zealand women, described as a ‘lyrical, slow-moving’ and ‘meditative’. Reviewing her more recent novel Cross Fingers, author Nicky Pellegrino wrote: ‘Part thriller, part social comment, part history, this is a very New Zealand story, stylishly written and compellingly plotted’.

Paddy’s work has appeared in journals, anthologies, including takahē and Landfall and on radio. It has been highly commended in several writing competitions, including the Katherine Mansfield and Sunday Star Times Short Story Awards. Paddy is an experienced teacher of creative writing and has been a speaker at many writing festivals including the most recent Dunedin Writer and Readers Book Week. In 2012, she represented New Zealand at both the Leipzig and Frankfurt Book Fairs. In 2019 she spent six months in Wellington as the Randall Cottage Writer in Residence.

Paddy’s latest novel, By the Green of the Spring is the gripping story of lives changed forever by war, the hurts suffered, the losses borne, and the secrets kept, yet it is also the story of the capacity of the human spirit to endure, to hope and to love.

Links

Paddy on Facebook

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Quentin Wilson Publishers writer page

Upstart Press author page

Penguin Books NZ author page

Wikipedia

Radio NZ interview: Paddy discusses the upcoming sequel to Through the Lonesome Dark (Dec, 2019)

Sarah Quigley is a novelist, short-story and non-fiction writer. She has a DPhil in Literature from the University of Oxford, and has published five novels, three collections of short fiction and poetry, a memoir, and a creative writing manual. Publishers include Penguin, Virago, Random House and Head of Zeus. She is a previous winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Award (2001) and the Sunday Star Times Short Story Award (2004), and short-listings for fiction include the Bridport Prize and the Fish Short Story Prize. Reviewing her novel Fifty Days (Virago, 2004) The Observer wrote: ‘Sensual, monstrous and bewitching . . . Quigley’s prose imparts constant shocks of lyricism, intensity and acuity’.

Sarah’s novel The Conductor (Random House NZ, 2011) was the highest-selling adult fiction title in New Zealand in 2011, staying at Number One for twenty weeks. It was subsequently long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and short-listed for the Prix Femina in France, and has been widely translated. Her poetry and short stories have been published in multiple anthologies and journals such as takahē, NZ Listener, Landfall, Poetry New Zealand, New Writer UK, 100 New Zealand Short Short Stories, and Mutes and Earthquakes. Sarah was shortlisted in the Reviewer of the Year category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards (1999 and 2000). In addition, she has received a Buddle Finlay Sargeson Fellowship (1998), and was the joint recipient of the Robert Burns Fellowship (2003).

Since 2000, after winning the inaugural Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency, Sarah has divided her time between Germany and New Zealand. As well as writing fiction and a monthly column for Next magazine (for which she won Best Columnist in the New Zealand Magazine Publishing Awards 2015) she works as an editor at Cornerstones Literary Consultancy in London, and also for various fine art and architecture publishers in Europe.

Sarah’s most recent work, The Divorce Diaries (Penguin Random House, 2020), which began as a monthly column, is a deeply personal memoir, sometimes serious, sometimes funny, set against the colourful bohemian backdrop of her adopted city, Berlin.

Links

Sarah’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Penguin Books author page

Reviews and interviews

Elizabeth Knox is one of New Zealand’s most successful writers. Author of fourteen novels and three novellas, her poetic, imaginative work ranges from autobiographical fiction, to fantasy. With each publication, Elizabeth has continued to gain awards and recognition. In 2000 she was the recipient of the Arts Foundation New Zealand Laureate Award, in 2002 was awarded an ONZM for her services to literature in the New Zealand Queen’s Birthday honours list and in 2020 a CNZM once again for services to literature. She received the prestigious Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2019. Author Anna Smaill wrote: ‘Elizabeth Knox’s brain is an engine that runs on narrative’.

Amongst her extensive list of accolades, Elizabeth’s book The Vintner’s Luck (first published by Victoria UP, 1998) won both the Deutz Medal for Fiction, the Readers’ Choice and Booksellers’ Choice awards in the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and the Tasmania Pacific Region Prize (2001). It was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize (1999). The Vintner’s Luck is published in ten languages. Elizabeth’s book for young adults, Dreamhunter (HarperCollins, 2005), won the 2006 Esther Glen Medal and was selected as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults (2007). Dreamhunter’s sequel Dreamquake (HarperCollins, 2007), was a Michael L Printz Honor book for 2008 and, in the same year, was named an ALA, a CCBC, Booklist, and New York Library best book. A collection of essays, The Love School won the biography and memoir section of the New Zealand Post Book Awards in 2009. Elizabeth’s latest young adult title, Mortal Fire, was a finalist in the 2014 LA Times Book Awards, and won the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Young Adult Fiction. In 2014 she was the recipient of the Michael King Writer’s Fellowship.

Her fantasy novel, The Absolute Book (VUP, 2019) is described by writer Pip Adam as ‘a triumph of fantasy grounded in the reality and challenges of the moment we live in’. The Absolute Book was longlisted for the fiction prize in the 2020 Ockham Book Awards.

Also in 2020, Elizabeth edited (with David Larsen) Monsters in the Garden: An Anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy. Casting its net widely, this anthology of Aotearoa-New Zealand science fiction and fantasy ranges from the satirical novels of the 19th-century utopians to the bleeding edge of now. Featuring stories by some of the country’s best known writers as well as work from exciting new talent, Monsters in the Garden invites you for a walk on the wild side.

Elizabeth has recently released a young adult novel, Kings of This World (Allen & Unwin, 2025), which Hera Lindsay Bird describes as ‘deep and dangerous, a forensic campus thriller’.

For three and a half years, calamities hit Elizabeth Knox and family in rapid succession. Her sister suffered a psychotic break and was hospitalised against her will, her husband’s brother died by violence, and her mother was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Her latest work Night, Ma is a memoir about the net of family which people are held by, but also slip through. It is about the actual daily work of love; the physical and cognitive work love requires.

Elizabeth lives in Wellington with her husband, Fergus Barrowman, and son, Jack.

Links

Visit Elizabeth’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

NZETC list of works, journals and citations

Wikipedia 

ANZRB review of Kings of this World (Sept, 2025)

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Leading Pacific poet, performer and children’s author Tusiata Avia has travelled the world performing her award winning one-woman poetry show based on her 2004 collection Wild Dogs Under My Skirt. Her collection The Savage Coloniser Book (VUP, 2020) won the Mary and Peter Biggs prize for poetry at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, making Tusiata the first Pacific woman to win this prize in the Awards’ 53-year history. Tusiata’s poetry collection Fale Aitu │ Spirit House (VUP, 2016) was shortlisted for the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Writer Nafanua Kersel describes Tusiata’s poetry as ‘a full-body plunge in winter seas. It’s breathtaking, skin tingling and teeth rattling. I feel alive.’

Tusiata has received many significant awards including the 2013 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, a 2023 Te Herenga Waka Distinguished Alumni Award, and the 2024 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement. In 2020, she was an Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate, and was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. In 2024, Tusiata received a Creative New Zealand Senior Pacific Artists Award. Tusiata has also held a number of residencies including the Fulbright Pacific Writer’s Fellowship at University of Hawai’i (2005) and the Ursula Bethel Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury (2010). Recently she was appointed Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) and Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence for 2026.

Tusiata’s The Savage Coloniser Book is a personal and political reckoning in which she addresses James Cook in fury. She unravels the 2019 Christchurch massacre, walking us back to the beginning. She describes the contortions we make to avoid blame. And she locates the many voices that offer hope.

Big Fat Brown Bitch (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023) is a brilliant and eviscerating work that includes poems of defiance, confrontation, consolation, satire, sorrow and fury. Big Fat Brown Bitch was longlisted for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.

Her most recent collection, Giving Birth to My Father (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025), is an extraordinarily rich poetic work about grief and renewal that will rearrange its readers. Giving Birth to My Father takes in a world of family and memory, including a sequence of poems about a much-loved brother as he faces a life-threatening injury. It is a book about ways of holding one another even after we are gone. Giving Birth to My Father was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry.

Links

Tusiata Avia’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre poet page

Victoria University Press author page

Wikipedia

ANZRB review of Big Fat Brown Bitch (Dec, 2023)

Stuff interview: Tusiata discusses The Savage Coloniser Book and her inspiration (May, 2021)

TVNZ Breakfast: Monique Fiso and Tusiata Avia reflect on wins at Ockham Book Awards (May, 2021)

ANZL review of The Savage Coloniser Book (Oct, 2020)

Philip Temple has an impressive writing curriculum spanning more than 50 years. He is author of numerous fiction and non-fiction work for both adults and children, often on the subjects of New Zealand history and the natural world. His anthropomorphic novels, such as Beak of the Moon, are unique in New Zealand literature. His biography of the Wakefield family, A Sort of Conscience, earned several awards, including Melbourne University’s Ernest Scott History Prize. Several of his books have been published internationally. He has written extensively for television, contributed to countless magazines and journals, and been an editor for the NZ Listener and Landfall. Amongst his numerous accolades, in 2005 he received a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement and has been appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for his services to literature. In 2007, his examined work earned him the higher degree of Doctor of Literature from the University of Otago.

Philip received the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer’s Residency (2003), and previously held both the Menton Katherine Mansfield and Robert Burns Fellowships. He is a long standing, active member of the New Zealand Society of Authors, serving as judge, chair, president, vice-president and international delegate.

In 2014 Philip’s mountaineering novel, The Mantis, was published as an e-book in the UK.  The NZ Listener described it as ‘at the summit of fiction writing’. His tenth novel, MiStory, published in the same year, looks at what the future may hold if we carry on with ‘business as usual’. A 50th anniversary edition of his book The Sea and the Snow was released mid 2016.

More recently Philip published Life As A Novel: A Biography of Maurice Shadbolt: Volume One 1932–1973  (2018) and Life As A Novel: A Biography of Maurice Shadbolt: Volume Two 1973- 2004 (2021) through David Ling Publishers.

Philip Temple lives in Dunedin with his wife, poet and novelist, Diane Brown.

Links

Philip Temple’s website

NZ Society of Authors writer page

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Penguin Random House author page

Auckland University Press author page

Radio NZ interview with David Ling discussing Life as a Novel: Volume Two (March, 2021)

Noted edited extract prologue from Life as a Novel: Volume One (Nov, 2018)

Radio NZ interview discussing Life As A Novel Volumes One & Two (Oct, 2018)

Tracey Slaughter was born in Papatoetoe in 1972, and grew up on the Coromandel Peninsula. Her poetry and short fiction have been widely anthologised in New Zealand and received numerous awards. Her first collection of poems and short stories, Her body rises, was published by Random House (2005), and her novella, The Longest Drink in Town by Pania Press (2015). Her short story collection, deleted scenes for lovers, (Victoria University Press, 2016) contains 17 stories, some of which have already won awards, and was longlisted for the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In 2019 Tracey published her poetry collection, Conventional Weapons (Victoria University Press), which closely observes the beauty and depravity of human nature. Her collection of short fiction Devil’s Trumpet (VUP, 2021) includes thirty-one exhilarating new stories. Novelist Andrew Miller, judge for the 2014 UK Bridport Prize, praised her skill at ‘the difficult art of selecting the telling moment, the detail that speaks,’ and her ‘determination to find what is luminous in what is plain’.

Tracey’s accolades include the international Bridport Prize (2014), BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards (2004 and 2001), the international Fish Short Story Prize (2020), Manchester Poetry Prize (2023) and the Calibre Essay Prize (2024). In 2015 she won the Landfall Essay Competition, and was the recipient of the 2010 Creative New Zealand Louis Johnson New Writer’s Bursary. Her stories have been shortlisted for the Sunday Star Times Short Story Award three times (2002, 2006 and 2011), and she was a winner of the NZ Book Month Award Six Pack Two (2007). In 2023 Tracey was awarded the Manchester Fiction Prize for an unpublished portfolio of poems titled opioid sonatas. In 2024 she won the Calibre Prize for her essay ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’ and the Moth Short Story Prize for her story ‘reasons to end us (an aerial view)’.

Tracey teaches Creative Writing at the University of Waikato, and edits the journals Mayhem and Poetry NZ. She now lives in Cambridge with her partner and teenage sons.

Her most recent work the girls in the red house are singing (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024) is a powerful new collection of poems that begins with opioid sonatas, the sequence that won the £10,000 Manchester Poetry Prize in 2023 and was longlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Victoria University Press author page

ANZRB review of the girls in the red house are singing (Aug, 2024)

Youtube video of Tracey reading from the Moth Prize winning story ‘reasons to end us (an aerial view)’ (Aug, 2024)

Radio New Zealand review of Devil’s Trumpet (April, 2021)

The Spinoff Review on Devil’s Trumpet: ‘The Sexiest Lines from NZ’s Sexiest New Book’(April, 2021)

NZ Listener review of deleted scenes for lovers (June, 2016)

Radio New Zealand interview (May, 2016)

Catherine Robertson is a fiction writer whose romantic comedy novels have all been number one New Zealand bestsellers. Her novel The Hiding Places (Penguin Random House, 2015) won the Nelson Libraries Award for NZ Fiction, and was described in The New Zealand Listener as ‘exceptionally well written and very charming.’ The Otago Daily Times has described Catherine’s writing as ‘quirky, funny and unafraid’. Reviewing The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid (Penguin Random House, 2011), Kerre Woodham wrote: ‘…a warm, laugh-out-loud, funny romantic comedy. . . Robertson is a refreshing new writer…and deserves to be an international success.’

Catherine’s work has also been published in Germany, Italy, and France. She has had shorter fiction works published in HOME (Random House, 2005), in Turbine (IIML, 2015) and a non-fiction essay in SPORT 44 (VUP). She contributes to the New Zealand Book Council’s Booknotes Unbound and New Zealand Books. Catherine has worked as a magazine feature writer, advertising copywriter and business consultancy owner and is currently a freelance contributor and book reviewer for The Spinoff, Newsroom, and Landfall. She was a longstanding reviewer for New Zealand Books and the NZ Listener.

A regular guest on Radio NZ’s The Panel and Jesse Mulligan’s Book Critic slot, Catherine also teaches creative writing in prisons with the Write Where You Are team. She has participated in national festivals such as the Auckland Writers Festival, Writers on Mondays, and Wellington Writers Week, both as speaker and/or chair, and was also a feature author at the Frankfurt Book Fair. She chaired the Wellington branch of the NZSA for four years, was the NZSA rep on the Book Awards Trust for two years, and is currently on the board of Verb Wellington. In 2015, she completed the MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University, and was recently named the 2020 International Institute of Modern Letters Writer in Residence.

In 2016 Catherine was the recipient of a Creative New Zealand grant which she used to work on a memoir/biography of her late mother’s teenage years in a cult-like organisation called Moral Rearmament (MRA) and the subsequent resounding effects on both their lives.

Her recent novel Corkscrew You (HarperCollins, 2024) is a sparkling, small town romance set in a winery. Could the guy Shelby Armstrong loves to hate turn out to be the perfect pairing?

Catherine’s most recent novel Kiss My Glass (HarperCollins, 2025) is a laugh out loud romance story involving Frankie Armstrong’s return to her family vineyard in California. Now she is back in the grasp of the vines she has hated her whole life, confronted by memories that bring nothing but fury, and having to join forces with the sexiest arrogant jerk she’s ever had the misfortune of meeting.

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Links

Catherine Robertson’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Penguin Random House writer page

Radio NZ review of What You Wish For (Feb, 2019)

Richard Reeve is an Otago-based poet, editor and reviewer. His five collections of poetry to date are Dialectic of Mud (Auckland UP, 2001), The Life and the Dark (Auckland UP, 2004), In Continents (Auckland UP, 2008), The Among (Maungatua Press, 2008) and Generation Kitchen (Otago UP, 2015). Richard holds a PhD on ‘New Zealand poetic reality’, and is a lawyer by profession. While his poetry often is philosophical, he describes himself as ‘as a poet of visceral themes and energetic language.’

Much of Richard’s work is informed by an ontological environmentalism. Although he regularly writes in free verse, his poetry as a whole shows a loyalty to poetic form. Nicholas Reid has written: ‘Reeve’s own engagement with the raw matter of the world is evident… Another is his awareness of form – not a slavish adherence to traditional poetic forms, but an ability to reference them as he presents his own worldview. In this he is almost unique among his New Zealand contemporaries.’

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Auckland University Press author page

Otago University Press author page

takahē review of Generation Kitchen (April, 2016)

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Born in Christchurch in 1939, Wystan Curnow’s distinguished, multi-faceted career has spanned over five decades. A widely regarded poet, critic, curator and editor, Wystan has published six collections of poetry, authored or edited 18 books of art and literary criticism, and curated more than 20 exhibitions in New Zealand and internationally. Wystan ‘allows the mundane to filter in, unadulterated,’ wrote Christina Barton. ‘He mixes art, life and setting, and turns the abstract, universal time of the art he describes into something real and durational’.

Moving freely between literature and the arts, theory and practice, Wystan’s keen observations in the form of long essays, reviews and reports have provided essential, in-depth commentary on New Zealand contemporary art since 1970. His collection of art writings, The Critic’s Part (Victoria UP, 2014), was awarded the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand’s gold medal for best collection (2015), and in 2005 he became a Companion to the New Zealand Order of Merit for contributions to art and literature. He was awarded the 2018 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in non-fiction.

Wystan completed an MA in English at the University of Auckland (1961), and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (1970) with a thesis on Herman Melville. He lectured for many years at the University of Auckland, teaming up with Roger Horrocks and Michele Leggott on an influential course in American poetry. Wystan has held writer’s residences in Buffalo, New York, Avize, Champagne, Giaoli, Tuscany, and Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. In 2009, he was Distinguished International Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Wystan co-edits the journal Reading Room, published by the E. H. McCormick Research Library at the Auckland Art Gallery, and co-directs JAR, New Zealand’s first solar powered art gallery in Kingsland, Auckland.

In 2020 Wystan was awarded a CLNZ / NZSA research grant for his project Colin McCahon, Let Us Possess One World.

He currently resides in Northcote, Auckland.

Links

Victoria University Press author page

Random House Books author page

Creative New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Acheivement media release (2018)

NZ Listener review of The Critic’s Part: Wystan Curnow Art Writings 1971-2013 (Jan, 2015)

Radio New Zealand interview with Wystan (Nov, 2014)

Reading Room Journal

Anna Smaill is a poet, novelist and violinist whose first novel The Chimes (Sceptre, 2015) was longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. ‘To call The Chimes striking,’ one reviewer wrote, ‘is to underplay what might be the most distinctive debut of the decade.’ The Sunday Star Times wrote that ‘Harpers Bazaar, Huffington Post and The Independent are all touting The Chimes as one the best books of 2015. With its imaginative rendition of future place and space, and absorbing cast and plot, it’s easy to see why’.

Anna’s first book of poetry, The Violinist in Spring (Victoria University Press, 2005) was listed as one of the Best Books of 2006 by the NZ Listener. Paola Bilbrough (New Zealand Books) described it as ‘a meditation on what it means to be alive’. In addition, Anna’s poetry has been published in various anthologies and journals, including Sport, Landfall and the NZ Listener.

Anna holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Auckland and an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. After completing her PhD at UCL, she lectured in Creative Writing at the University of Hertfordshire. In 2016, she was awarded Honorary Literary Fellow at the New Zealand Society of Authors Waitangi Day Honours. She has been a participant in a multitude of literary festivals both nationally and internationally.

Anna’s second novel Bird Life (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), is a lyrical and ambitious exploration of madness and what it is like to experience the world differently. Emily Perkins describes the book as ‘an astonishing book about grief, beauty and survival… the writing enters your bloodstream like a strange and wonderful drug.’ Bird Life was longlisted for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.

Anna lives on Wellington’s south coast with her husband, novelist Carl Shuker, and their daughter.

Links

Anna Smaill’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

ANZRB review of Bird Life (Dec, 2023)

Review of The Chimes in The Guardian (2015)

Interview with James Kidd, Independent on Sunday (2015)

Review of The Chimes in The New Zealand Herald (2015)

Review of The Chimes on Tor.com (2015)