Members Archive – Page 5 of 16 – Academy of New Zealand Literature

Born in Yorkshire in 1934, poet, actor, playwright and critic, Peter Bland is known for his conversational, approachable style. ‘No New Zealand poet,’ wrote Kevin Ireland in the NZ Listener, ‘has greater graphic energy or a more creative visual sense. He writes in a carefully crafted vernacular of deceptive skill and power’. Peter has an extensive list of poetry collections, also plays, children’s books and a memoir, published in New Zealand and the UK. Amongst his accolades he has received a Cholmondeley Award, Melbourne Festival Award, the MacMillan Brown Prize for Creative Writing, and the Observer/Arvon Foundation International Poetry Prize. In 2011, Peter was awarded the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for services to literature.

After immigrating to New Zealand in 1954, Peter aligned himself with poets Louis Johnson, James K Baxter, Alistair Campbell and Vincent O’Sullivan. This group and their work, characterised by its reaction to repressive, nationalistic 1950s New Zealand, contributed to a new literary scene where ordinary lives were celebrated on the page. Peter also worked as a journalist, and was Head of Spoken Programmes at the old NZBC. He was co-founder and artistic director of Downstage Theatre, for which he wrote several plays. In 1985 he starred alongside Billy T James in the feature film Came a Hot Friday, for which he won a GOFTA Best Actor Award. He has written several plays for radio and the stage. With regards to his poetry Conor O’Callaghan in the Times Literary Supplement wrote: ‘His approach to the twin themes of home and exile is original and he has helped to modernize the representation of landscape within New Zealand in recent decades. This alone is no small achievement’.

Acting fuelled Peter’s poetry, and to date he now has more than 20 collections in circulation. Peter feels as if ‘the last 55 years of writing has taught me a lot about how I want to say things…there’s a great deal that still needs to be said.’

Nowhere is too far off (Cuba Press, 2020) is Peter’s 25th collection and packed with curiosity, humour and warmth, and is a signal to the world that words haven’t failed him yet.

Retired from acting, Peter currently lives in Auckland.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Wikipedia

NZ On Screen bio page

Steele Roberts author page

Radio New Zealand Poets and Poetry Collection

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre Best New Zealand Poems (2014)

Radio New Zealand review of Expecting Miracles (Oct, 2015)

Sunday Star Times interview and review of Collected Poems 1956-2011 (Feb, 2013)

NZ Listener interview and article (Dec, 2012)

'One of writing’s greatest magics is to allow us – to use Kiri Piahana-Wong’s phrase – to slide outside the trap of time.' - David Taylor

Catherine Chidgey is a fiction writer and multiple award winner whose novels have achieved international acclaim. Her novel The Beat of the Pendulum (Victoria UP, 2017) was longlisted for the 2018 Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize and described as ‘sensationally clever writing’ (Best Books of 2017, Radio NZ), and as ‘genuinely cutting-edge…Chidgey has created her work out of the very fabric of our times. It is art made out of posting, of surface and veneer’ (Landfall). Her much anticipated fourth novel The Wish Child (Victoria UP, 2016) was an instant bestseller, winning the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham Book Awards (2017) and the Nielsen Independent NZ Bestseller award (2018). Catherine’s novel Remote Sympathy (VUP, 2020), was shortlisted for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Remote Sympathy is set in Nazi Germany. A tour de force about the evils of obliviousness, Remote Sympathy compels us to question our continuing and willful ability to look the other way in a world that is once more in thrall to the idea that everything – even facts, truth and morals – is relative. Diverse in subject and setting, Catherine’s work is ‘writing of extraordinary precision’ (Landfall), crafted by ‘an artist who may claim a perfect ear, an exquisite tone’ (Evening Post), and who ‘finds metaphor, contiguity and paradox wherever she looks’ (NZ Herald). ‘Intelligent, lyrical, disciplined and observant, she is the real deal, the star of her generation’ (NZ Listener).

In a Fishbone Church, Catherine’s debut novel, received Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South-East Asia and South Pacific region), the UK Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Time Out magazine (London) chose her second novel, Golden Deeds, as a book of the year. Golden Deeds was also a 2002 Best Book in the LA Times Book Review, a 2002 Notable Book in the New York Times Book Review, runner-up for the Deutz Medal and serialised by Radio New Zealand. The NZ Herald described Catherine’s third novel, The Transformation, as the ‘best so far’. US bookstore chain Barnes & Noble chose it as a Discover Pick of 2005. Her short fiction is also widely published in anthologies and journals.

Catherine’s numerous accolades include the prestigious BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award (2013) and the Listener Womens’ Book Festival Short Story Award (1997). She received the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters and in 2003 was named best New Zealand novelist under forty by a NZ Listener industry panel. Catherine has held the Sargeson Fellowship, the Todd New Writers’ Bursary, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship (France), the Rathcoola Residency (Ireland), the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship and the University of Otago Wallace Residency. She has been Writer-in-Residence at the universities of Canterbury, Otago and Waikato.

With degrees in German literature, psychology and creative writing, Catherine now teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato in Hamilton. She has translated children’s picture books from the German for Gecko Press. Catherine’s first children’s book, Jiffy, Cat Detective, was published by One Tree House in November 2019.

In 2019, with sponsorship from the University of Waikato, Catherine conceived the Sargeson Prize short story competition – New Zealand’s richest short story prize.

In The Axeman’s Carnival (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), which is narrated by a magpie, this writer is at her finest – comic, profound, poetic and true. The Axeman’s Carnival won the prestigious Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Pet (Te Herenga Waka University Press,2023) is an elegant and chilling psychological thriller set in New Zealand in 1984 and 2014, with probing themes of racism and misogyny. Pet was longlisted for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.

Already a huge success with sell out copies and multiple rave reviews, Catherine’s most recent work, The Book of Guilt (Te Herenga Waka University Press, May 2025), is a spellbinding novel and a profoundly unnerving exploration of belonging in a world where some lives are valued less than others. The Book of Guilt is currently shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Victoria University Press author page

Wikipedia

ANZRB review of The Book of Guilt (May, 2025)

Kirkus review of The Wish Child (Oct, 2018)

Booklist review of The Wish Child (Oct, 2018)

Publishers Weekly review of The Wish Child (Oct, 2018)

The Wish Child chosen as a Top 20 Bestseller of the Decade (Sept, 2018)

The Wish Child wins the 2018 Nielsen Independent NZ Bestseller (Aug, 2018)

Booksellers NZ review of The Beat of the Pendulum (April, 2018)

NZ Books review of The Beat of the Pendulum (Feb, 2018)

NZ Listener article ‘A Way with Words’ by Catherine Chidgey (Dec, 2017)

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Weekend Herald review of The Beat of the Pendulum in ‘To and fro of daily words’ (Nov, 2017)

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Interview with The Times [UK] (July, 2017)

Pantograph Punch interview (June, 2017)

Radio New Zealand interview with Wallace Chapman (May, 2017)

Ockhams Award announcements in the New Zealand Herald (May, 2017)

Ockhams Award announcements in Stuff (May, 2017)

Ockham Award winners announcement in New Zealand Book Awards website (2017)

TV3 Newshub interview (May, 2017)

TVNZ Breakfast interview (May, 2017)

NZ Business Review article (May, 2017)

NZ Herald interview (May, 2017)

NZ Listener interview (May, 2017)

Landfall review (April, 2017)

NZ Books review of The Wish Child (March, 2017)

Radio New Zealand Best Books of 2016

Booksellers New Zealand review of The Wish Child [Sue Esterman] (2016)

Booksellers New Zealand review in The Reader [Stella Chrysostomou] (Dec, 2016)

Sunday Star-Times Summer Reading Picks – The Wish Child (Dec, 2016)

North & South review (Dec, 2016)

NZ Herald review of The Wish Child (Dec, 2016)

Paula Green review in the Sunday Star-Times (Nov, 2016)

Takahe review of The Wish Child (Nov, 2016)

Sunday Star Times interview and article regarding The Wish Child (Nov, 2016)

Pressreader (NZ Listener) review of The Wish Child (Nov, 2016)

Radio New Zealand Standing Room Only interview (Nov, 2016)

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Otago Daily Times review of The Wish Child (Nov, 2016)

'Novels stand outside time, with their narrative structure of beginning, middle and end. They outlast politics, which are by nature ephemeral, swift and changeable and can quickly become invisible, detectable only to the skilled eye. ' - Fiona Farrell

Poet, fiction and non-fiction writer Anna Jackson has published seven collections of poetry and written and/or edited a diverse list of works, from literary criticism to short fiction. She has received the Louis Johnson New Writers’ Bursary (1999), was named the Waikato University Writer-in-Residence (2001), won the Louis Johnson New Writer’s Award (2000), and was a recipient of the prestigious Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (2016). In 2017 she was awarded a residency at the Michael King Centre in Auckland. Anna has been described by reviewer Anne Kennedy as ‘one of New Zealand’s most remarkable contemporary poets’ and by Sarah Quigley as ‘that rare thing – a true original’.

Anna’s poetry has covered both external and internal journeys, family and the domestic environment, character portraiture, metaphysics, romance, and an extended engagement with classical literature, particularly the poetry of Catullus. Her collection Thicket (Auckland UP, 2011) was shortlisted for the New Zealand Post Book Awards (2012), while The Pastoral Kitchen (Auckland UP, 2001) was shortlisted for the Montana Book Awards (2002). Lumiére reviewer Joan Fleming describes I, Clodia, and Other Portraits (Auckland UP, 2014) as ‘sure-footed and witty, with both loveliness and torque’ and a work in which Anna explores ‘the precarious space where poems might just be stories’.

Anna graduated with an MA from Auckland University, completed her DPhil at Oxford, and now lives in Island Bay, lecturing at Victoria University, Wellington.

Anna’s latest collection, Terrier, Worrier (AUP, 2025) is part autobiography of thought, part philosophical tract, and part poetics. A book about chickens and family and seasons, Terrier, Worrier is a literary sequence to be relished as language and as thought. It is currently shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry.

Links

Anna Jackson’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Victoria University staff page

Auckland University Press author page

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre poet page

ANZL review of Actions and Travels: How Poetry Works (March, 2022)

Creative New Zealand Menton Fellowship announcement and bio (Nov, 2015)

Radio New Zealand interview following Menton Fellowship announcement (Nov, 2015)

Cordite Poetry Review interview (Aug, 2015)

Landfall review of I, Clodia, and Other Portraits (Aug, 2015)

The Lumiere Reader interview (Feb, 2015)

Radio New Zealand review of I, Clodia, and Other Portraits (Feb, 2015)

'My readers turn up...and I meet them as human beings, not sales statistics on a royalty statement.' Fleur Adcock

Thom Conroy is a fiction writer and senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University in the Manawatu. He also tweets as part of the WriteCreative Massey group and through ACWRN (the Aotearoa Creative Writing Research Network).

In 2014, Thom Conroy published an historical novel entitled The Naturalist (Penguin Random House), which rose to number one in the Nielsen Bestseller’s list for fiction. His most recent novel was The Salted Air (Penguin Random House, 2016). Written in prose that is ‘punchy, dry, very elegant’. Sonja de Friez says, The Salted Air, ‘just sings’ and calls Conroy ‘a very interesting writer indeed’ (‘Nine to Noon’, Radio New Zealand). Writing of The Salted Air in The New Zealand Listener, Elizabeth Heritage says, ‘it is satisfying too to see Conroy working his craft’.

Thom’s short fiction has been published widely in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. His work has been recognised by Best American Short Stories 2012 and has won various other awards, including the Katherine Ann Porter Prize in Fiction and the Sunday Star Times Short Fiction Competition. In a review for the NZ Herald, David Hill writes, ‘Thom Conroy has already published a lot of shorter fiction, and won awards with it. He’s put in the writer’s kilometres, and The Naturalist‘s measured, lucid style shows this’.

Thom is currently working on a novel around environment impacts associated with intensive agriculture and a linked collection of short fiction entitled Emergency Procedures.

Links

Massey University profile page

Random House Books author page

Radio New Zealand interview with Lynn Freeman on ‘Standing Room Only’ (June, 2016)

Radio New Zealand interview on ‘Saturday Mornings with Kim Hill’ (Aug, 2014)

Book review of The Salted Air (June, 2016)

‘What Words Weave’ – article about The Salted Air (June, 2014)

Radio New Zealand review of The Naturalist on ‘Afternoons with Simon Mercep’ (Nov, 2014)

Lipsyn podcast conversation with Thom Conroy (June, 2015)

Photo credit: Suzanne Chelius

'...we were there as faith-based writers, as believers in the mana of Oceania...' - David Eggleton

Bryan Walpert is the author of four books of poems, a novella, two novels, a collection of stories and two books of literary criticism. His work is characterised by an interest in marrying intellect to feeling, often employing as one reviewer observed, ‘the language and the prism of science and philosophy to try to rein in and explain the vicissitudes of life’.

His poetry collection, Native Bird (Mākaro Press) has been praised by critics for its ‘sharp, self-deprecating awareness’, for the way it ‘transforms the ordinary’ and as ‘one of those books where the poems reach out and hold you in the grip of attention’. His first collection, Etymology, was noted for ‘conjuring tricks with language’, while A History of Glass was called ‘delicate and translucent’. Bryan’s latest collection of lyric poems Brass Band to Follow (OUP, 2021) ranges in its focus from flowers to infinities, from laundry to eternity, but is founded most fully on what it is to move into middle age – to wait for life’s promised brass band to arrive.

Bryan won the 2020 Seizure Viva La Novella Prize (Australia) for his book Late Sonata; judges noted the ‘seamless melding of the emotional and the intellectual, its brilliant evocations of music and literature and a structure that offers both suspense and humour.’ His fiction collection, Ephraim’s Eyes, named a Best Book of 2010 on Radio New Zealand, received praise for its ‘mastery of the short story’, and ‘stories that resonate with compassion and insight’. One observer wrote that the ‘muscle of the stories is in the well-wrought complex characters [with] pitch-perfect voices who live ordinary lives alight with detail’. His monograph, Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry, was called ‘an important contribution to the study of contemporary poetry and science’ while his critical book Poetry and Mindfulness: Interruption to a Journey was a finalist for the Ashton Wylie Mind Body Spirit Literary Awards.

He has received, among other awards, the James Wright Poetry Award from the Mid-American Review, first prize in the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, and shortlisting for the Montreal International Poetry Prize.

Bryan moved to New Zealand in 2004 from the U.S. to take up a position at Massey University. A Professor in creative writing, he has received a national Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award.

Brass Band to Follow (OUP, 2021), Bryan’s fourth collection, ranges in its focus from flowers to infinities, from laundry to eternity, but is founded most fully on what it is to move into middle age – to wait for life’s promised brass band to arrive.

In his novel Entanglement (Mākaro Press, 2021), a memory-impaired time traveller attempts to correct a tragic mistake in an entangled tale of love, desperation and physics. Entanglement was shortlisted for the 2022 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction and named among the Best Books of 2021 by the New Zealand Listener.

Bryan’s latest fiction work Empathy (Mākaro Press, 2025) involves a new game EmPath, where people progress by learning to understand one another without direct communication, a perfume fragrance with dangerous effects, and a murky world where empathy can be bought and sold – and can lead to murder. Empathy was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction.

Links

Bryan Walpert’s website (for publications, sample work and reviews)

Bryan on Facebook

Bryan Walpert’s blog

Massey University profile

ANZ Review of Books review of Empathy (Oct, 2025)

ANZL review of Entanglement (Mar, 2022)

Ockham 2022 shortlist announced (Mar, 2022)

ANZL review of Brass Band to Follow (Oct, 2021)

Corpus review of Poetry and Mindfulness (Nov, 2018)

Poem ‘Smoke’ on the Montreal International Poetry Prize Longlist (2015)

‘This Poem is Conversational’ in Best NZ Poems 2015

Radio New Zealand review of Native Bird (2015)

Booksellers NZ review of Native Bird (Dec, 2015)

NZ Poetry Shelf review of Native Bird (Dec, 2015)

Poem ‘Forgetting’ in Cordite Poetry Review (Aug, 2015)

NZ Listener review of Native Bird (June, 2015)

Massey University article on Native Bird (April, 2015)

takahē review of A History of Glass (2013)

Poem ‘Aubade’: Shortlisted for Montreal International Poetry Prize (2013)

Poem ‘objective correlative’: Finalist in 2011 U.S. Rattle Poetry Prize (Sept, 2012)

'...we were there as faith-based writers, as believers in the mana of Oceania...' - David Eggleton

Rosetta Allan is a writer of poetry and fiction. She is a regular supporter, speaker, guest artist, and emcee at literary and historical events in her hometown, Auckland, New Zealand. Rosetta has judged several poetry and short story awards, and published two volumes of poetry: Little Rock (2007), and Over Lunch (2010). She has published three novels: Purgatory (Penguin, 2014), The Unreliable People (Penguin, 2019) and her most recent novel, Crazy Love (Penguin, 2021).

Purgatory received an exceptional response, remaining on the Nielsen Weekly Bestsellers list for two months, and was selected as an Apple iBook ‘Top Ten Best Reads of 2014’. Tanya Allport described Purgatory as ‘one of those books that draws you into its exquisitely crafted, atmospheric and entirely believable world within the first couple of pages’ (Booklovers, June 2014). Reviewer John McCrystal described her writing as ‘accomplished with a talent for capturing quirks of human behaviour, movement and appearance, along with an acute ear for dialogue, effort that isn’t spared even for minor characters’ (NZ Herald, June 2014).

Rosetta’s essay, ‘Dear mother – Songs of the Kamikaze’, featured in The Griffith Review 48, Enduring Legacies (2015). She has contributed to publications in the UK, New Zealand, Australia and USA, including the journals Blackmail Press, NZ Poetry, takahē, Interlitq, Ika, Broadsheet, Whitireia’s 4th Floor, and the anthology Short and Twisted (Celapene Press, 2015). In July 2016, she was honoured to be the inaugural Letter Writer for the Academy of New Zealand Literature with her feature ‘Letter from St Petersburg’.

Rosetta won the Kathleen Grattan Award for Best Series of Poetry (2010), the Metonomy Best Poem Award (2010), was a South Pacific Pictures Emerging writer’s lab internship winner (2011), and co-edited JAAM literary journal 2015.

In April 2016, Rosetta was the first New Zealand Writer-in-Residence at the St Petersburg Art Residency in Russia, where she researched her recent novel, The Unreliable People, launched by Penguin Random House, NZ, May 7, 2019.

In 2017, Rosetta received First Class Honours for Master of Creative Writing from the University of Auckland, and was awarded a Sir James Wallace Scholarship for Master of Creative Writing. In 2018 she was the recipient of the Michael King Writers Centre Summer Residency. In February 2019, Rosetta held the position of Creative NZ/University of Waikato Writer in Residence in Hamilton for the year.In 2022 Rosetta was announced as a recipient of a 2023 residency at the Michael King Writers Centre, Auckland.

Rosetta’s latest book Crazy Love is a vivid novel based on her own experiences, and explores how – as the Van Morrison song suggests – crazy love can take away the troubles. It can, though, add a whole lot more.

Links

Rosetta’s website

Rosetta on Twitter

Rosetta on Facebook

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Penguin Books author page

ANZL review of Crazy Love (Aug, 2021)

Radio NZ interview discussing The Unreliable People with Kathryn Ryan on Nine to Noon (May, 2019)

Radio NZ review of The Unreliable People (May, 2019)

Waikato University feature article discussing The Unreliable People (May, 2019)

ANZL feature ‘Letter from St Petersburg’ (July, 2016)

Beattie’s Book Blog review of Purgatory on Radio Live (June, 2014)

NZ Herald review of Purgatory (June, 2014)

NZ Booklovers review of Purgatory (June, 2014)

Radio New Zealand interview with Rosetta (June, 2014)

Essay (with poetry) ‘Dear Mother’ in Griffith Review 48 (May, 2015)

Tim Upperton is a poet, reviewer, teacher and blogger who has published three poetry collections. His first book, A House on Fire, was published by Steele Roberts in 2009. His second poetry collection, The Night We Ate The Baby, was an Ockham New Zealand Book Awards finalist in 2016. In his third poetry collection A Riderless Horse (AUP, 2022) Tim stands in the everyday and then runs with it with poems of acid wit, intimations of loss and unexpected resolution.

Tim won the Bronwyn Tate Memorial International Poetry Competition in 2011, and Caselberg International Poetry Competition in 2012, 2013 and again in 2020. His poems have been published in many magazines including Agni, Poetry, Shenandoah, Sport, Takahe, and Landfall, and are anthologised in The Best of Best New Zealand Poems (2011), Villanelles (2012), Essential New Zealand Poems (2014), Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century (2014), and Bonsai (2018). He also regularly writes book reviews for New Zealand newspapers including the Dominion, the Listener, and Landfall. Tim is a former poetry editor for Bravado, and judged its poetry competition in 2008. He tutors poetry, fiction and travel writing in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University, Palmerston North campus.

Links

Auckland University Press A Riderless Horse

Haunui Press The Night We Ate The Baby

The Guardian interview discussing Tim’s poem ‘The Truth About Palmerston North’ chosen by actor Sam Neil (Feb, 2021)

Spinoff The Friday Poem: ‘My childhood’ (Feb, 2021)

NZ Poetry Shelf audio spot: Tim reads ‘So Far We Went’ (July, 2020)

NZ Poetry Foundation: Tim reads ‘The truth about Palmerston North‘ (Feb, 2018)

'Character to some extent is much a construction of the reader as it is of the writer.' - Lloyd Jones

Ben Sanders was born in Auckland in 1989. Graduating in 2012 with a Bachelor of Engineering, Ben wrote his first novels while studying at university. Since his initial publication when he was twenty, he has been listed for the Ngaio Marsh Award multiple times, won the Bellingham Wallace Emerging Talent Award (2012), the AIMES Arts Award and Sir Peter Blake Trophy (2014).

Ben’s first three novels are set in Auckland, The Fallen (2010), By Any Means (2011), and Only the Dead (2013) and all received both critical and commerical success. The Fallen was a number one bestseller, named in the NZ Listener top 100 and longlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award. By Any Means was also a bestseller and a finalist for the Nagio Marsh Award. Ben’s US debut, American Blood, the first in a new series set in America and featuring ex-NYPD officer Marshall Grade, was published in 2015. It has been sold for publication and translation in Germany, Russia and Japan, and optioned for film.

Ben’s latest Marshall Grade novel Exit 45, through Allen & Unwin, was published in January 2022. He is currently working on a stand alone novel.

Links

Ben’s website

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Wikipedia

Stuff interview discussing Ben’s ‘double life’ and and Exit .45 (Jan, 2022)

Stuff Q & A: ‘How I write’ (Jan, 2021)

Crimewatch review of American Blood (Nov, 2015)

NZ Herald interview (2011)

'NZ literature is such a vast and varied thing' - Pip Adam

Paula Morris on Witi Ihimaera:

In the late 70s, when I was at high school in West Auckland, our teachers showed us a short film, originally part of a TV series called Winners and Losers. Each episode was based on a New Zealand short story, and the one we saw was Big Brother, Little Sister. The story’s writer was Witi Ihimaera. I’d never seen anything like it – an urban setting I could recognise, kids I understood, a story that was about here and now, startling in its familiarity, in its lyricism and its ugliness.

But this is what Witi has always done: tell us stories about ourselves. In novels like Tangi and The Matriarch, he was teaching and entertaining us at the same time, navigating the boundaries separating the worlds of Māori and Pākehā, as well as the increasingly disengaged worlds of rural and urban Māori. Central to his work is the notion of the spiral: his stories reach back and forth through time, and encompass the mythic and the ordinary, digressions and dreams; he’s at equal ease with gods, rangatira and street kids. It’s a profoundly and audaciously Māori world view, and an attempt to re-envision the European form of the novel through Māori narrative traditions.

This audacity is something I admire in Witi. He moves into other forms – writing opera libretti, writing for the stage – and returns to his early novels to revise and re-shape them, unhampered by stodgy respect for The Text. He sees his own ‘family pantheon’ as just as expansive and dramatic as anything in Greek mythology. (He’s only written the first volume of his autobiography – Maori Boy – and it’s already being described as epic.) He’s not mired in tradition, either. He ventures into comedy, into fantasy and sci-fi. Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies is a Māori Western; The Uncle’s Story confronts Maori intolerance about homosexuality.

Perhaps the confidence to play, provoke and to re-invent is a result of his deep grounding in place – Waituhi, near Gisborne; his home marae is Rongopai; his iwi is Te Whānau-a-Kai – and the vital ancestral connection it provides. (The red-carpet premiere for Lee Tamahori’s 2016 film Mahana, based on Bulibasha, took place in Gisborne.) He’s been a generous mentor to new generations of writers, including students and including me. He wants us to be free to tell our own stories, to write our way into our own pasts and futures. It would be churlish not to take up the challenge.

Accolades

NZSA President of Honour (2022-23)

Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (2017)

Ockham New Zealand Book Award for General Non-fiction (2016)

Te Tohutiketike a Te Waka Toi, Creative New Zealand Te Waka Toi Awards (2009)

New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate (2009)

Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award [longlist] (2008)

Honourary Doctorate, Victoria University (2004)

Fulbright Residency, George Washington University (2004)

Best Book in the South Pacific & South East Asian Region Commonwealth Writers’ Prize [shortlist] (2004)

Nielsen BookData New Zealand Booksellers’ Choice Award (2001)

Montana New Zealand Book Award for Fiction (1995)

Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship (1993)

Goodman Fielder Wattie Book of the Year Award (1986)

Writing Fellowship Victoria University (1982)

Burns Fellowship Otago University (1975)

Goodman Fielder Wattie Book of the Year Award (1973)

Goodman Fielder Wattie Book of the Year Awards [third] (1972)

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Arts Foundation writer page

Wikipedia

Penguin Books author page

Huia Books author page

Radio New Zealand review of Maori Boy (Nov, 2014)

Radio New Zealand interview regarding Maori Boy (Nov, 2014)

Stuff.co.nz interview (June, 2013)

‘Inspiration is the name for a privileged kind of listening’ - David Howard

Greg McGee’s first play, Foreskin’s Lament (1981), is one of New Zealand’s most successful and drew on rugby culture of the time to comment on national values. As crime writer Alix Bosco, Greg is the author of the novel Cut and Run (2009), winner of the 2010 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime, and Slaughter Falls (2010). He has won several TV awards, including Best Drama Writer for two of his political documentary dramas: Erebus: the Aftermath (1987), and Fallout (1994).

In 2012 he produced two new books: a biography of All Black Captain Ritchie McCaw and a novel, Love & Money. He was awarded the prestigious Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (2013) where he wrote The Antipodeans (Upstart, 2015) which was longlisted for the 2016 Ockham Award for fiction.

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Penguin Books author page

Upstart Press author page

Wikipedia

NZ OnScreen biography (includes plays/films)

Playmarket playwright page (with links to plays)

Radio New Zealand review of The Antipodeans (Aug, 2015)

BookNotes Unbound interview (July, 2015)

Radio New Zealand interview regarding The Antipodeans (July, 2015)

NZ Herald review of The Antipodeans (July, 2015)

Radio New Zealand interview regarding Love and Money (March, 2012)

NZ Herald interview (Oct, 2012)

Sunday Star Times interview regarding Alix Bosco (Aug, 2011)

'Many of our best stories profit from a meeting of New Zealand and overseas influences' - Owen Marshall