Academy of New Zealand Literature

 

Louise O’Brien on Elizabeth Smither:

Elizabeth Smither tends to be described first as a poet, having published her first collection Here Come the Clouds in 1975 when she was in her mid-30s. Since then, she’s won the Poetry Section of the New Zealand Book Awards (1990), the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry (2000), been named Te Mata New Zealand Poet Laureate (2001-3), and received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry (2008). Critics admire her idiosyncratic style, witty and intellectually curious, which is usually (but not always) unrhymed, usually (but not always) brief – even miniaturist – and which is distinguished by a rigour and directness which Smither has described as aiming, above all, at truth. Recurring themes include the elusive and deceptive nature of language, and a pervasive interest in Catholicism – particularly in the sense of universal – which is all-embracing in its acceptance of the world in its contradictions.

Smither’s extensive body of poetry has often and, for me, regrettably, overshadowed her prose work. It is in her short stories and novels in which she most powerfully expresses a moving tenderness to the human condition, though the hand of a poet is certainly evident in prose which is characterised by such intensity of image, while paying close attention to the workings of language.

I read Elizabeth Smither because she writes about wonderfully smart and complex women, offering sensitive insight into their domestic lives and relationships.

I read Elizabeth Smither for the optimistic and freeing possibilities in her resistance to closure or conclusion, in character, narrative and, also, in life more broadly. Her stories acknowledge the uncontrollable messiness of life, the ragged edges of a self, the chaos of experience, the many aspects of an individual, and finds melody in the discord. Using multiple narrative perspectives and voices, moving between multiple places and times, her novels and stories accumulate the facets of a life and narrative without ever suggesting that these can be exhausted.

I read Elizabeth Smither because in her books no-one is ordinary; no matter how banal their daily routines, the people in her stories are endlessly complex and interesting in their emotional and intellectual lives. Indeed, it’s precisely in the mundane that there’s a glimpse of the transcendent, something larger that’s evident in the smallnesses of the everyday. These characters are written by an author who genuinely seems to like them, who observes with an irony both detached and empathetic, forgiving poor choices and personal inadequacies as necessary part of a glorious whole, while always refraining from judgement.

I read Elizabeth Smither for the powerful sense of movement and action in her work, for the athletic flexibility of her intellect.

I read Elizabeth Smither to be immersed in worlds which are themselves immersed in literature, celebrating the beauty of words, the power of a lyric, the transformative possibilities of just the right line of poetry. A literary motif might be a starting point for a story, and her characters and narrators are often readers themselves (or sometimes librarians, as was Smither herself), always framed by a rich literary context: they quote poetry and philosophy, compare themselves to literary figures, are changed by what they’ve read. Writers and their luminous words are alive in Smither’s writing and their effects ripple ever outwards: hers are worlds I feel at home in.

 

Accolades

Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry (2018)

Sarah Broom Prize for Poetry (2016)

Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in poetry (2008)

Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (2004)

Creative NZ Grant (2004)

Finalist for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards (2004)

Awarded an honorary DLitt from the University of Auckland for contributions to literature (2004)

Te Mata Poet Laureate (2002)

Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry (2000)

New Zealand Book Award for Poetry (1990)

Lilian Ida Smith Award (1989)

Literary Fund Travelling Bursary (1988)

Scholarship in Letters in (1987) & (1992)

Auckland University Literary Fellowship (1984)

Freda Buckland Award (1983)

Writing Bursary Award (1977)

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre poet page

The Poetry Archive poet page

Penguin Books author page

Auckland University Press author page

Cape Catley author page

Wikipedia

ANZRB review of Angel Train (Feb, 2026)

ANZL review of My American Chair (Dec, 2022)

RNZ interview discussing Night Horse (May, 2018)

Ockham NZ Book Award Announcement (May, 2018)

ANZL interview by David Hill  (Sept, 2016)

Stuff.co.nz interview following 2016 Sarah Broome Prize (May, 2016)

Booksellers NZ article following 2016 Sarah Broom Prize (May, 2016)

Radio NZ interview (July, 2013)

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Selina Tusitala Marsh on Albert Wendt:

Maualaivao Albert Wendt ONZ CNZM (1939-) is known as the ‘Forefather of Pacific Literature’.  Those who know him better might rephrase that as ‘The Godfather of Oceanic Literature’.  That’s because since the rise of Pacific Literature in late 1960s, little happened in the field that wasn’t connected to this writer, artist, anthologist, teacher, and scholar. Samoan by birth, Oceanic by nature, Albert has taught in Samoa, Fiji, New Zealand, and Hawai’i.  Wave after wave of his creative and critical writings have washed up on the intellectual and artistic shores of Oceania for over five decades.  His writings have changed the way Oceanians think about themselves and how others think of Oceania.  In his wake, Albert has left generations of writer-scholars who have gone on to write, teach and make art throughout Melanesian, Micronesia and Polynesia, and in the global Pasifika diaspora.

Since writing what is commonly hailed as the first Pacific novel Sons For The Return Home (1973), Albert has gone on to publish widely, across and in between genres writing over 18 works of fiction (novels and short story), poetry collections and plays.  He has garnered numerous awards for his work, including winning the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards for his novel Leaves of the Banyan Tree in 1980, the Montana Award for Reference and Anthology for Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English in 2004, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Asia Pacific Region) for his novel in verse Adventures of Vela in 2009.

The calibre of his writing and influence has been widely acknowledged.  In 2001 he was awarded the Companion of the NZ Order of Merit, and in 2013 he received New Zealand’s highest honour, the Order of New Zealand for his Service to Literature, which only twenty people can hold at any time. Albert has also been awarded New Zealand’s Senior Pacific Islands Artist’s Award (2003), Japan’s Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture (2004), and holds four honorary doctorates: a Doctorate of Literature from the University of Bourgoyne, France (1993), a Doctorate of Literature from Victoria University (2005), a Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Hawaii (2009), where he held the Citizen’s Chair for four years, and a Doctorate of Literature from the Univesite-o-Samoa (2015). In 2012, Albert won the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Fiction, was the Honoured New Zealand Writer at the 2013 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival where he received a standing ovation for his contribution to New Zealand writing.  Albert became the New Zealand Book Council patron in 2015. His latest works are a short memoir of his early writing life,  Out of the Vaipe, the Deadwater (Bridget Williams Books) and the novel Breaking Connections (Huia).

The Godfather he doesn’t suffer fools. By his own admission, he was grumpy in the late ‘80s (when I first met him), when he was Head of the English Department and the word ‘racism’ wasn’t just found in his writing.  Grumpiness happens when artists can’t do their art, although judging from his literary prolificacy, it was only his painting that suffered.  In retirement, his painting has flourished and his work has been exhibited internationally. But the best viewings are held in his Ponsonby home, former residence of Labour Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage, and then All Black Bryan Williams.  My koha for the viewing is often a Waiheke caught snapper.  What I get in return is a Chardonnay, Reina’s cooking, and long wordy lunches.

 

Accolades

Icon Award from the New Zealand Arts Foundation (2018)

Honoured New Zealand Writer, Auckland Writers’ Festival (2013)

Member of The Order of New Zealand (2013)

Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (2012)

New Zealand Post Book Awards finalist – Poetry (2011)

Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Asia Pacific Region (2009)

Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, University of Hawai’i (2009)

Honorary Doctor of Literature, Victoria University (2005)

Japan’s Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture (2004)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards – Reference and Anthology (2004)

Awarded New Zealand’s Senior Pacific Islands Artist’s Award (2003)

New Zealand Order of Merit for Services to Literature (2000)

 

Links

Albert Wendt on Facebook

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre poet page

Complete bibliography, including journals, academic works and plays

Wikipedia

Auckland University Press author page

Huia Books author page

Bridget Williams Books (BWB) author page

ANZL Interview with Albert Wendt (April, 2024)

RNZ review of Breaking Connections (May, 2016)

NZ Listener review of Out of the Vaipe (Sept, 2015)

Youtube: Albert reading at Leadership New Zealand’s ‘Dinner with a Difference’ (2014)

Youtube: Albert reading ‘Inside Us the Dead’ (2014)

NZ Listener interview (Sept, 2012)

 

Elizabeth Alley on Owen Marshall:

Each chapter of Owen Marshall’s novel Love as a Stranger (2016) is prefaced by the stylised shadow of a man, becoming more sinister as the plot gathers momentum. Familiars of Marshall’s work will recognise this as a recurring motif, in that shadow, or shaded nuance, are all part of a fine craftsmanship that has earned his place in the forefront of our prose fiction writers.

Interviewing Owen Marshall for radio on many occasions during the 1980s and 90s, the shadow had a different significance. I could never quite rid myself of the shadowy image of a policeman – tall, strongly built, direct, economical of movement, yet with faint echoes of a careful, deliberate speech habit probably learned from the classroom. But what stood out was his rigorous attention to a detailed question, the intense thoughtfulness of his answers, and his ability to make an interview a reflective, original and completely engaging exchange. Over 20-odd years he remained absolutely one of my favourite interviewees.

Occasionally described as ‘too male, too bleak’, his 30-odd book career has put paid to those somewhat arcane labels. Certainly it’s been in the provinces and small towns of rural New Zealand, often those of the South Island, where his voice is heard most acutely in his many volumes of short stories. His characters, wrought from the granite and limestone of their home places, are inexorably hewn into that landscape.  His gift is for shaping character by casual reference that instantly reveals them. Donald McDonald (Coming Home in the Dark) is like ‘living with a cartoon, … though he has some nice dark suits and drives a Camry. I’d say he was a very hairy man’ (‘Living in the Belle Monde’).

In ‘The Aftermath of Moloch’s Heaven’, a story that should bury for all time the label of a sober demeanour, ‘Old Celia has a face like a Cheviot ewe and a stable of trotters known from one end of the country to the other.’ Story after story reveals the opposing dualities that fascinate him – comfort and disturbance, and what he describes as ‘the tidal swings of confidence and security.’ If his stories sometimes lack strong plot, they exhibit instead his stronger interest in tone and response, and the ineffability of humankind.

At his best quietly celebrating lives more often regarded as ordinary, Marshall also takes delight in exploring the many ambiguities found amid the swings and roundabouts of the human condition. Perhaps what is most remarkable is his consistently empathetic view of his characters. Even in his latest novel, Love as a Stranger, the increasingly sinister and darkly flawed character of Hartley, is partly excused by his twisted view of the nature of love.

Over many years of interviews and public appearances as a short story writer, Marshall frequently fielded questions about novel writing. ‘But the short story is what I do best’, he would invariably answer.  Perhaps the example of Slaven, who had ‘a compulsion to speak out’, proved irresistible. Since that first novel, A Many Coated Man in 1995, and those which followed, these longer works, some more memorable than others, now constitute a body of work that has given him space to explore some of the heftier moral issues that interest humankind. His combination of satire, laconic wit and compassion coupled with an elegance of language and penetrating insight, continues to enrich our literature.

 

Accolades

Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (2013)

Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for Services to Literature (2012)

Antarctica New Zealand’s Arts Fellowship (2009 / 2010)

New Zealand Society of Authors Woollaston Estates Writer-in-Residence (2007)

New Zealand Society of Authors President of Honour (2007 / 2008)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards for Fiction [shortlist] (2006)

Invited to France as part of Les Belles Etrangeres (2006)

Appointed adjunct professor University of Canterbury (2005)

The Press South Island Writers’ Award (2004)

Creative New Zealand Writers’ Fellowship (2003)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction (runner-up) (2003)

Honorary DLitt, University of Canterbury (2002)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction (2000)

ONZM for Services to Literature (2000)

Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship in Menton, France (1996)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards for Fiction (shortlist) (1995)

Otago University Robert Burns Fellowship (1992)

New Zealand Literary Achievement Award (1990)

New Zealand Literary Fund Scholarship in Letters (1988)

American Express Short Story Award (1987)

Evening Standard Short Story Prize (1987)

PEN Lilian Ida Smith Award (1986 & 1988)

Canterbury University Literary Fellowship (1981)

 

Links

Owen Marshall’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Wikipedia

Penguin Books author page

Bridget Williams Books (BWB) author page

ANZRB review of New Stories (Nov, 2024)

Radio NZ interview discussing film adaptation of ‘Coming Home in the Dark’ from The Author’s Cut (July, 2021)

ANZL extract from Ockham 2020 fiction shortlisted Pearly Gates (May, 2020)

Takahē review of Love as a Stranger (Aug, 2016)

Stuff.co.nz review of Love as a Stranger (April, 2016)

Radio New Zealand extract of Love as a Stranger (April, 2016)

NZ Listener interview regarding The Larnachs (June, 2011)

 

Marion McLeod on Marilyn Duckworth:
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Camping on the Faultline, she called her memoir, and it’s certainly true that Marilyn Duckworth’s life has held more than its fair share of uncertainty and upheaval. She was born in Otahuhu in 1935 but didn’t stay long.  Her father, Cyril  Adcock, was a man on the move.  He taught in Kuaotunu (in the Coromandel) and in Tokorangi (in the Manawatu). In the latter, young Marilyn and her family (mother Irene, older sister Fleur) were housed in the school shelter shed, with a canvas flap for front door.

Then, when Marilyn was three, there was a long sea voyage. War was declared as they sailed towards Suez.  In England they lived in Kent, the Midlands, Surrey, Sussex, Wiltshire. . . sometimes with parents, sometimes as evacuees. Marilyn and Fleur invented a Bronte-type imaginary world called Dreamland.

She was eleven when she finally returned to her mythical homeland. She found it strange and tropical. She had expected everybody to be like her – instead they were brash, fat, and had terrible accents. They thought her as odd as the English had.  She hated it all and had terrible nightmares.

Change was a constant in New Zealand, too.  When I interviewed Marilyn for the Listener nearly forty years after that wretched return, she was about to move into her twenty-fifth house with her fourth husband. Though Wellington has remained a constant. And family: she has four daughters and several grandchildren.

Against this changing background, the constancy of Marilyn’s writing is something to be marvelled at.  As a ten-year-old she turned out adventure novels with alliterative titles. (She’s always been good at titles.)  Each of those books was twenty thousand words long and had twenty chapters. That discipline has stayed with her through a long career, though chapter and word counts are now more flexible. Her bibliography includes fifteen novels, one short story collection, a book of poetry, the memoir, and anthology about sisters, and scripts for radio and television.

A Gap in the Spectrum, her first published novel, came out in 1959 when Marilyn was 23. It is the scary story of a young woman, Diana Clouston, who wakes up one day in a room in London, with no memory of who she is. Gradually she works out that she is a New Zealander who is to be married – to a man she can’t remember.

In her novels, Marilyn Duckworth has employed differing techniques and a wide variety of plots.  But that first novel contained the wellspring of her fiction. There and always, her prose is spare and sure-footed – clean, crisp, concise. Her dialogue is spot on – it’s no wonder the television world wanted her.  But there’s another layer:  her domestic realism has a way of transmuting into something shaky. Menace turns the pages.  Not the menace of a clichéd horror story but something more understated and therefore more frightening.

There is something wonderfully unchanging in Marilyn Duckworth, both in person and in her prose.  She has poise.  People tell her things.  And she has a good-humoured and compassionate understanding of the vagaries of the human condition.
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Bio

Marilyn Duckworth is a writer of novels, poetry, short stories and memoirs, who resides in Wellington. She describes herself as a ‘New Zealander in her wooden tent above a faultline, practising the trick of permanence’. She published her first novel at the age of twenty-three in 1959 and has continued to produce works of fiction that reflect contemporary life, with many of her novels featuring women with complex lives and relationships. As well as publishing over 15 novels, various short stories and a novella, she has edited a book on writing sisters in New Zealand (her sister is the poet Fleur Adcock), and an autobiography, Camping on the Faultline. She has also written extensively for television and radio.

The recipient of many residencies and awards, Marilyn is invariably included in lists of writers who have influenced New Zealand literature. The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature says: ‘Duckworth’s writing has been much praised for her sharp ear for dialogue (the “crispest and crackliest … of any of our novelists” according to Kevin Ireland), her brilliant powers of observation, and her skilful enquiries into les affairs du coeur.’

 

Accolades
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Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction (2016)

President of Honour of the New Zealand Society of Authors (2011 / 2012)

Foxton Fellowship (2004)

Millay Arts Centre Residency (2001)

Ucross Foundation Residency (1997)

Auckland University Literary Fellowship (1996)

Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (shortlisted) (1996)

Sargeson Writing Fellowship (1995)

Hawthornden Writing Fellowship (1994)

Arts Council New Zealand Scholarship in Letters (1993)

Victoria University Writer’s Fellowship (1990)

Australia New Zealand Writers’ Exchange Fellowship (1989)

Fulbright Visiting Writer’s Fellowship (1987)

OBE for Services to Literature (1987)

Montana New Zealand Book Award for Fiction (1985)

Goodman Fielder Wattie Book of the Year Award (shortlisted) (1985)

Katherine Mansfield Fellowship (1980)

Literary Fund Scholarship in Letters (1961 & 1972)

New Zealand Literary Fund Award for Achievement (1963)

 

Links
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Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Wikipedia

Penguin Books NZ author page

Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement announcement (Oct, 2016)

Writers’ College interview (2015)

Radio New Zealand broadcast of Marilyn’s Janet Frame lecture ‘Learning to Swivel: The Changing Face of New Zealand Literature’ (2012)

Quote Unquote interview by Elizabeth Knox (Dec, 2011)

 

John McCrystal on Lloyd Jones:

One of the nicest things about being asked to write an appreciation of Lloyd Jones and his work is that the first time I spoke to him, he felt both had been under-appreciated.

He had a point. It was August 2001, and he had just been honoured with the Deutz Medal for fiction for his remarkable novel, The Book of Fame. You could tell that this recognition had come as something of a relief, because it had been a long time between drinks. The last major award he had picked up had been in 1988, when he was the Katherine Mansfield Fellow to Menton. He had published only one novel by then — Gilmore’s Dairy in 1985. Splinter (memorably described by the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature as ‘that rare thing, an interesting novel about Lower Hutt’) was published during the year he spent in France. He received warm acclaim for a collection of short stories (Swimming to Australia and Other Stories) in 1991, but had seemed to fall out of favour thereafter. At the time I talked to him, even the success of The Book of Fame couldn’t quite make up for the indifference with which his superb novels Biografi (1993) and Choo Woo (1998) had been received, in this country, at least. He considered them, not without justification, to be some of his best work, and he darkly muttered that it was the prevailing market predilection for talented and dazzlingly beautiful young women writers that made it so hard for ‘grumpy old men with no hair’ to make the grade.

By the time I caught up with him in a professional capacity again, this time in 2006, he was on the cusp of literary stardom, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it. His latest novel, Mister Pip, had been the subject of a bidding war amongst publishing houses, and he had received a cool million dollars in advance on royalties. And within twelve months, he had collected another Deutz Medal, the Commonwealth Prize for Fiction and had been short-listed for the Man Booker for Mister Pip as well.

His subsequent novels have been acclaimed — he would have a strong case to argue that Hand-Me Down Life hasn’t been as highly acclaimed as it deserves — and it will mean much to him that in the wake of the incandescent success of Mister Pip, his publishers are re-visiting his back-catalogue.

The great things about Lloyd are his fearlessness, his restlessness and his seriousness. He is a passionate New Zealander (you only need to look at some of his celebratory side-projects, such as the photographic essays to which he has contributed text, Barefoot Kings and Last Saturday, to say nothing of his compendium of New Zealand sportswriting, Into the Field of Play). But his humanity won’t let him ignore injustice here or abroad. He doesn’t flinch from hard subject matter — child abuse, the lot of the world’s vast numbers of dislocated souls, the brutality which humankind is capable of visiting upon itself. Yet he is the crafter of luminous prose, and adept at lightening the dark places his imagination visits. He is constantly moved to experiment with the way in which he tells stories — the prose poem of The Book of Fame, the indirect characterisation techniques he uses in Biografi and in Hand Me Down World, where our impression of the character is contructed from a matrix of second-hand accounts.

We’re lucky, as a small nation, to have so many excellent writers. We are especially blessed to call our own a writer of such international stature as Lloyd.

 

Accolades

DAAD Berlin Artist-in-Residence (2015-16)

Visiting Fellow at the Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice (2014)

New Zealand Post Book Awards finalist General Non-fiction (2014)

Berlin International Prize for Literature [shortlist] (2013)

Longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (2012)

Honorary Doctorate Degree, Victoria University (2009)

Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction (2008)

Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate (2008)

Booksellers Association Independent Booksellers’ Book Prize (2008)

Antartica New Zealand Arts Fellowship (2008)

British Book Awards Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year (2008)

Kiriyama Prize (2008)

Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer-in-Residence (2007)

Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Overall Best Book (2007)

Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book in the South East Asia & South Pacific Region (2007)

Man Booker Prize [shortlist] (2007)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards Montana Medal for Fiction (2007)

Montana Readers’ Choice Award (2007)

Storylines Notable Non-fiction Book (2005)

New Zealand Book Award for Children & YA Honour Award (2004)

Spectrum Print Book Design Award (2004)

LIANZA Children’s Book Awards’ Russell Clark Award for distinguished contribution to illustration (2004)

Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize (2003)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards Fiction [runner-up] (2002)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards for Fiction (2001)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction (2001)

Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship (1989)

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Arts Foundation writer page

British Council: Literature author page

Wikipedia

Penguin Books author page

Massey University Press author page

Text Publishing author page

RNZ interview discussing The Cage (Jan, 2018)

Stuff.co.nz Dominion Post article (Aug, 2013)

Sydney Morning Herald interview (Aug, 2013)

NZ Listener extract from A History of Silence (Aug, 2013)

Matamata born Gregory O’Brien is a prolific poet, non-fiction writer, illustrator, painter and editor. His books and short fiction have been published in New Zealand, Australia and the UK. His work is widely anthologised and has also appeared regularly in many literary journals. His accolades include the Frank Sargeson Fellow (1988), Victoria University Writer-in-Residence (1995), and Stout Memorial Fellow (2015-16). In 2012, Gregory was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (Non-fiction). The same year he received a Laureate Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand. In the New Year’s Honours (2013-14), Gregory was awarded an MNZM for Services to the Arts.

Gregory graduated with a BA in Art History and English from Auckland University (1984), has worked as journalist, Arts Editor for TV3’s Arts program, editor for Sport magazine, and was senior curator at City Gallery Wellington. He now works full-time on writing and visual arts-related endeavours. His art and writing from the ‘Kermadec’ art project, Raoul Island, has been exhibited in galleries and museums in New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, Chile and New Caledonia. Poems and drawings from this project are included in his two recent collections: Beauties of the Octagonal Pool (AUP, 2012), and Whale Years (AUP, 2015).

Amongst Gregory’s other books are a memoir, News of the Swimmer Reaches Shore (Carcanet, UK; VUP, 2007), Euan MacLeod: The Painter in the Painting (Piper Press, 2010), A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy (AUP, 2011), Pat Hanly (Ron Sang Books, 2013), and three books introducing New Zealand art to young and curious readers: Welcome to the South Seas (2004), Back and Beyond (2008), and See What I Can See (2015).

His latest book Don Binney: Flight Path (Auckland University Press) is a richly illustrated account of the life and work of one of New Zealand’s most iconic artists. Recently, Don Binney: Flight Path won the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for Illustrated Fiction.

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Arts Foundation profile page

Wikipedia

Auckland University Press author page

ANZL review of House and Contents (March, 2022)

Radio New Zealand collection of interviews and reviews (2014)

 

Debra Daley is the author of novels The Revelations of Carey Ravine (Heron 2016), Turning the Stones (Heron 2014), and The Strange Letter Z (Bloomsbury, 1996) as well as several short stories. She also works as an editor. She was born in New Zealand and grew up in West Auckland. Her fiction has been described in the UK as ‘powerfully atmospheric’ (Rowan Pelling, Daily Telegraph columnist), and ‘gripping, tautly plotted and hauntingly beautiful’ (Vanora Bennett, author and former Times correspondent). In general her work combines a literary sensibility with commitment to an engaging narrative. Daley’s characters are often outsiders challenged with psychological and material survival in hostile worlds.

For many years Daley worked in the area of public health, editing newsletters and government reports, with a specialty in mental health.

Her early career was as a magazine journalist in London and Sydney and then as a screenwriter. She has written original TV dramas, (Universal Drive, The Shadow Trader, At the End of the Day, Pristine), that screened in New Zealand and around the world. According to the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, her television plays ‘are typically acutely observed and witty with a satirical edge tempered by a compassionate perspective’.

Debra has been a recipient of the Lilian Ida Smith Award for fiction, the Creative New Zealand Louis Johnson New Writers’ Bursary and the Sargeson Fellowship. She has an MA (Hons) from the University of Auckland in English Literature.

Her historical novel The Revelations of Carey Ravine (Heron/Quercus) was published in New Zealand, June 2016.

 

Links

Debra Daley’s website

Twitter:@ddaleyauthor

Lisa Doyle’s review of The Revelations of Carey Ravine (2015)

Author Q&A for Female First (2014)

 ‘My book deal moment’ for www.novelicious.com (2014)

At the age of 53, Stephen Daisley sold his first novel Traitor to Text Publishing. He subsequently won the 2011 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction and UTS Glenda Adams Award. This same novel was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers for Best First Book, the Western Australia Premieres Literary Awards and NSW Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. Stephen’s second novel, Coming Rain, won the 2016 Ockham Award and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Reviewer James Bradley (The Australian) wrote that ‘Daisley’s prose possesses a shimmering, allusive beauty reminiscent of John McGahern.’

Born in 1955 in Hastings, New Zealand, Stephen spent five years in the army before living in Bangkok, then worked in Australia and New Zealand as a sheep herder, bush cutter, truck driver, construction worker and bartender. After beginning his marriage and family life in New Zealand he eventually moved to Australia, attending Murdoch University and then the University of Western Australia for Post Graduate studies, supervised by Australian writer Gail Jones. During this time, Stephen underwent what he describes as his ’30 year literary apprenticeship’.

Stephen was the New Zealand writer in residence at Randell Cottage in 2017, during which time he worked on A Better Place, his third novel, about brothers at war. Beautifully written, brutal, tender and visceral, A Better Place is about love in its many forms. Published by Text in 2023, A Better Place was shortlisted for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.

Stephen lives in Western Australia with his wife and five children.

 

Links

Text Publishing author page

NZ Listener post-Ockham Award interview (May, 2016)

NZ Herald article (May, 2016)

Radio New Zealand interview (June, 2015)

Tim Corballis is a novelist, essayist and art writer based in Wellington. He is the author of five novels through Victoria University Press: Our Future is in the Air (2017), R.H.I. (2015), The Fossil Pits (2005), Measurement (2002), and Below (2001).

He has received a number of major awards and residencies for his writing, including most recently the Victoria University of Wellington Creative New Zealand Writer in Residence (2015). His essay ‘Winter’ won the Landfall Essay Competition in 2013.

Tim has a background in mathematics and philosophy as well as creative writing, has taught at tertiary level in philosophy, sociology and art and design theory, and currently teaches science communication. In 2014 he was awarded a doctorate from The University of Auckland, for work in the theoretical humanities and social sciences focusing on aesthetic theory in Antipodean contexts.

Collaborative work includes the 2007 exhibition project Si C’est (If It Is) shown at The Physics Room, Christchurch and Te Tuhi Gallery, Auckland, and the 2015 video artwork Machine Wind shown at Te Tuhi Gallery, both with photographer Fiona Amundsen. Machine Wind was subsequently shown at the 5th Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition 2016, Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei. In 2020 Tim again collaborated with Fiona Amundsen to create an exhibition ‘Human Hand’ at The Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, exploring three communities in Arizona that are all in some sense separated from the mainstream.

A Transitional Imaginary (Harvest Press, 2015) is a non-fiction book about the Christchurch earthquakes written in Christchurch with seven other writers over the course of one week.

Tim’s more recent works include ‘There is No Up, There is No Down’ in Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays from Aotearoa New Zealand (Victoria UP, 2016) and a review of John Lechte and Saul Newman, Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights in Thesis Eleven.

Tim’s latest book Our Future is in the Air (Victoria UP, 2017) is a captivating work about the invisible forces that make us who we are: science, politics, power – and our hoped-for futures.

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Victoria University Press author page

Radio NZ interview discussing Our Future is in the Air (July, 2017)

takahē review of R.H.I (April, 2016)

Landfall review of R.H.I on Jack Ross’s blog (Jan, 2016)

New Zealand Listener review of R.H.I (Nov, 2015)

Pantograph Punch interview with Tim Corballis (Nov, 2015)

Booksellers New Zealand review of R.H.I (Sept, 2015)

NZ Herald review of R.H.I (Sept, 2015)

Read’s Reader review of R.H.I (Sept, 2015)

Victoria University Press interview with Tim Corballis (Aug, 2015)

Novelist and short story writer, Craig Cliff has also published essays, interviews, reviews, poetry, travel writing, and been a columnist for the Dominion Post. Craig’s first novel, The Mannequin Makers (Vintage, 2013), has been described as ‘reminiscent of the likes of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda or Tim Winton’s Cloud Street’ (The Hoopla), and a ‘hymn to the vitality of life…a reminder of the extraordinary power of art’ (North & South).

In 2011 Craig won Best First Book in the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for his short story collection A Man Melting (Vintage, 2010). Judges described this as ‘of the moment’ and ‘rightly at home on a global platform’, naming Craig as ‘a talent to watch’. Craig was listed as a ‘Hot Author’ by Canvas Magazine (2013), and named ‘Hot Writer’ Sunday Star Times (2011). His work has made the ‘best book’ list in the NZ Listener (2013 and 2010), The Hoopla (2013) and Sunday Star Times (2010). A Romanian translation of The Mannequin Makers was released by Editura Univers in 2016.

Craig has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University, Wellington.  In 2007 he won the novice category of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Competition, and was two-time runner-up in the open category (2008 and 2010). He has judged the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Katherine Mansfield Literary Award. He has also participated in the Iowa International Writing Program (2013), as well as festivals in America, Australia and New Zealand. In 2015 he was a recipient of Eleanor Catton’s Horoeka Grant and in 2017 received the Robert Burns Fellowship.

His latest novel Nailing Down the Saint (Penguin Randon House, 2019) is about Hollywood, fatherhood, the pursuit of dreams, the moral calculus this entails, and the possibility that the rational, materialist worldview isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Craig lives in Wellington with his wife and two young children.

 

Links

Craig Cliff’s website (for full bibliography, reviews and accolades)

Craig’s blog

Random House Books NZ author page

Wikipedia