Academy of New Zealand Literature

Jolisa Gracewood on Patricia Grace:

Patricia Grace has reshaped the literary landscape, creating space for the overlapping worlds her subjects inhabit: town and country, school and marae, home and away, peacetime and war, Māori and Pākehā and all the interwoven identities that make up Aotearoa.

The scope of her vision has widened in compass while always being anchored in place. In her first novel, Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (1978), a young woman moves from a rural town with her ‘footstep on every stone’ to a city like ‘a great loom weaving its tangles and tufts of people into haphazard multi-coloured fabric’. In Chappy (2015), people shuttle between Denmark, Japan, Hawai’i, and Aotearoa in pursuit of connection. Te ao Māori is the whole world, and vice versa.

As much as I love Grace’s novels, I have always been drawn back to her early stories, which I cherish in well-worn Penguin paperbacks. Models of economy, they capture moments in time and yet are ageless: the past is ever-present, and the future hovers behind the reader’s shoulder. A sister being fitted for a bridesmaid’s dress confronts small-town race relations in words that could have been said yesterday. A boy whizzing joyously downhill on a bike is a law unto himself, while harking forward to later stories of unlawful searches and why brown lives matter. Children explore a beach, as they always have and always will, ‘and see their words curl in under the waves’ furl, and watch the words hurled back fragmented at their feet retreating.’

Again and again, in her clear-eyed prose, Grace calls us to really look at the moment we happen to be passing through – and the people we’re sharing it with, or not. ‘No one can take your eyes from you,’ says Granny Rita to Matewai, in the short story ‘Parade’. Home from the city for a town carnival after two years away, Matewai is uneasy at the spectacle of her whānau performing for a Pākehā crowd that doesn’t fully get it.  A waiata sung together in the dark on the way home begins to restore her equilibrium, along with words from the elders: ‘It is your job, this. To show others who we are.’ This arc alone would make a fine story, but Grace counterpoints it with droll observations of how the Pākehā folk perform too, ‘smiling to show what kind of day it was.’ Readers of all backgrounds are invited to sit a while with discomfort, en route to empathy. The story is only a few pages long, but lasts all day – and lingers.

As if to prove that the shorter the work, the greater the effect of each word, alongside Grace’s classic picture books and writings for the school journal sits her 2012 submission to the Board of Inquiry on the Kāpiti Expressway. In a scant 450 words, it outlines her whakapapa claim to land the government was attempting to appropriate for motorway-building (the uncanny resemblance of this scenario to the plot of Pōtiki hasn’t gone unremarked). The prose is calm, tenacious, factual, with quiet glimmers of the personalities of the tūpuna invoked. And the last line echoes hard: ‘So little of our Māori freehold land remains in Māori hands.’ The case was eventually upheld by two separate courts; the land is now officially reserved, and the expressway will curve around it, rather than carve through. Even if all books turn to dust, the enduring power of Grace’s words will still be there for anyone who has eyes to see.

 

Accolades

Ockham New Zealand Books Awards for General Non Fiction [finalist] (2022)

New Zealand Book Awards for Children & YA, Picture Book Award [finalist] (2016)

New Zealand Book Awards for Children & YA, Te Kura Pounamu Award (2016)

Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for Fiction [finalist] (2016)

Honoured New Zealand Writer at the Auckland Writers’ Festival (2014)

Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2008)

Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for Services to Literature (2007)

Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (2006)

Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon Awards (2005)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards, Deutz Medal for Fiction (2005)

Nielson Book Data New Zealand Booksellers’ Choice Award (2005)

Montana New Zealand Book Awards [finalist] (2002)

Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize (2001)

Booker Prize [longlist] (2001)

LiBeraturpreis in Frankfurt (1994)

Queen’s Service Order (1988)

Honorary DLitt, Victoria University (1989)

New Zealand Book Award for Fiction (1986)

Goodman Fielder Wattie Book of the Year Award [third] (1986)

Victoria University Writing Fellowship (1985)

PEN/Hubert Church Award for Best First Book of Fiction (1976)

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Arts Foundation writer page

Wikipedia

Penguin Books author page

Huia Books author page

ANZRB review of Bird Child & Other Stories (Penguin New Zealand, 2024)

Radio New Zealand interview following Te Waka Toi Awards (Sept, 2016)

The Spinoff interview (May, 2016)

Stuff.co.nz review of Chappy (June, 2015)

Radio NZ interview regarding Chappy (June, 2015)

Paul Cleave is an award-winning author who often divides his time between his home city of Christchurch, New Zealand, where all his novels are set, and Europe, where none of his novels are set. His works have been bestsellers that been translated into more than 20 languages and have sold over a million copies.

He has won the Ngaio Marsh Award three times, the Saint-Maur book festival’s crime novel of the year award, has been shortlisted for the Edgar, the Barry and the Ned Kelly. He’s appeared at festivals in the U.K, Turkey, France, Germany, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Taiwan, Tahiti, New Caledonia, and New Zealand.

His first published novel, The Cleaner (2006) was an international best-seller with sales exceeding 500,000. In 2024 The Cleaner was re-published alongside the release of Dark City – The Cleaner, a six-part TV series featuring an all-star Kiwi cast- the screen play also written by Paul Cleave.

Paul’s thirteenth novel The Pain Tourist (Upstart Press, 2022) is about a man who, critically injured following his parents’ murder, discovers he has lived out another life during his nine-year coma, and there are things he couldn’t possibly know

His latest work His Favourite Graves (Orenda Books, 2023) is an edge-of-your-seat, twisted and twisty thriller, in which desperate for reward money – and to rescue his marriage – an embattled sheriff takes incalculable risks to find a missing boy.

 

Links

Paul Cleave’s website

Paul on Twitter

Paul on Facebook

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Simon & Schuster [Atria Books] author page

Wikipedia

NZ Herald article on the release of the TV drama Dark City – The Cleaner (Feb, 2024)

Radio NZ review of His Favourite Graves (Nov, 2023)

NZ Listener article on Paul winning his third Ngaio Marsh Award (Aug, 2016)

Radio New Zealand review of Trust No One (March, 2016)

NZ Booklovers review of Trust No One (Nov, 2015)

NZ Herald interview (Jan, 2015)

Southland born writer Tanya Moir has published three novels and worked in various media both in New Zealand and overseas. Her third novel, The Legend of Winstone Blackhat (Vintage, 2015) was longlisted for the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. The NZ Listener described it as an ‘absolute standout, though be warned, it will haunt you for days afterwards . . . this deserves to become a New Zealand classic’.

Tanya’s first book, the critically acclaimed historical novel La Rochelle’s Road (Black Swan, 2011), was longlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize (2012). The Listener described it as ‘that wonder: absorbing historical fiction that replenishes our view of the world then and now’. Of her second novel, Anticipation, (Vintage, 2013), the Dominion Post wrote: ‘When [novels] are written as well as this one is, with as much energy and style, the result is a rare treat . . . Tanya Moir weaves a story as rich, intricate and colourful as a tapestry. It is briskly told and is deeply, satisfyingly good . . . Moir is clearly a New Zealand writer to watch’ and the Weekend Herald: ‘Her talent with prose is far reaching; her ability to pluck a clever phrase from a seemingly inexhaustible well of fluid imagination quite stunning’.

Tanya studied with the Hagley Writers’ Institute. She received the Margaret Mahy Award in 2008. She was awarded the Todd New Writer’s Bursary in 2012 and a Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship in 2013.

Tanya lives on Banks Peninsula with her husband.

 

Links

Tanya Moir’s website

Random House Books NZ author page

Radio New Zealand  interview with Lynn Freeman (2015)

Interview with Southland Times (2013)

Wellington writer Jenny Pattrick, is an acclaimed historical novelist. Her books The Denniston Rose (2003) and its sequel, Heart of Coal (2004), are among New Zealand’s biggest-selling novels and have been republished in illustrated editions. Jenny has also written fiction and commentary for radio, and with her musician husband, musical shows for children which are performed throughout New Zealand and abroad. She has been awarded the OBE for services to the arts and is featured in the Wellington Girls’ College Hall of Fame. In 2009, she was awarded the prestigious New Zealand Post Katherine Mansfield Fellowship. Carole Beu from the Women’s Bookshop, Auckland wrote in the NZ Listener: ‘Jenny Pattrick is in a category of her own: she is a fine writer but also popular’.

A celebrated story-teller, all of Jenny’s adult titles have been number one bestsellers in New Zealand. Her works include Landings (Penguin, 2012), and Inheritance (Penguin, 2010), (both number one bestsellers), as well as Heartland (2014), Skylark (2012), In Touch with Grace (2006), and Catching the Current (2005).

A former jeweller and teacher, Jenny is an active member of New Zealand’s arts community. She has been President of the Crafts Council of New Zealand, chaired the Arts Council of New Zealand, the Boards of Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School, the New Zealand School of Dance, and the New Zealand Festival of the Arts Writers and Readers Committee. Until recently, she served on the board of the New Zealand Book Council.

In her latest work, Sea Change (Bateman Books, 2025), Jenny departs from historical fiction to write about a Kapiti Coast community devastated by a tsunami. This riveting and charming story of survival celebrates tenacity, self-sufficiency, and a fierce love of home, even against dire odds.

 

 Links

Jenny Pattrick’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Bateman Books writer page 

Penguin Random House Books author page

100% Pure NZ Denniston Literary trail

Denniston Experience website

ANZRB review of Sea Change (July, 2025)

 

Harry Ricketts is an academic, poet, reviewer and editor who has published over 30 books. These include literary biographies ‒ The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling (Chatto & Windus, 1999) and Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War (Chatto & Windus, 2010), numerous articles on Kipling, personal essays and ten collections of poems, most recently Half Dark (Victoria UP, 2015). Victoria University Press describes Half Dark as ‘tender, funny, sad, and deftly crafted from the splinters and spaces of the past.’

In addition to his own work, Harry has co-edited several anthologies of New Zealand poetry, a collection of new essays about World War I, How We Remember: New Zealanders and the First World War (Victoria UP, 2014) and, most recently, with Gavin McLean, The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing (Penguin Random House, 2015). Spirit in a Strange Land: A Selection of New Zealand Spiritual Verse (co-edited with Paul Morris and Mike Grimshaw), was the 2003 winner of the Montana Book Awards. His book 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry (co-written with Paula Green), was shortlisted for the Montana Book Awards (2011), and Spirit Abroad: A Second Selection of New Zealand Spiritual Verse (co-edited with Paul Morris and Mike Grimshaw), was shortlisted for the Montana Book Awards (2005).

Harry has performed or chaired at a multitude of festivals both nationally and internationally, with discussion involving both well-known New Zealand and international figures. Previously, he studied English at Oxford University and lectured in Hong Kong and Leicester. He currently teaches English Literature and creative nonfiction at Victoria University.

His most recent poetry collection, Bonfires on the Ice (Te Herenga Waka University Press, Nov 2025), asks: what is happiness in a suddenly unfamiliar world? What happens to us once the old connections spark and disappear? With his characteristic humanity, intelligence and humour, Harry writes of youth, hope, books and writers, and the friendships through which we come to know ourselves. Included in this new book are poems about finding one’s way through a world altered by loss, and the magical thinking that sustains us.

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Penguin Books author page

Te Waka Herenga University Press author page

Awa Press author page

Headworx author page

Wikipedia

ANZRB review of First Things (June, 2024)

 

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is a Christchurch poet and a writer of non-fiction, and senior adjunct fellow in the School of Humanities and Creative Arts at the University of Canterbury. Born in London, Jeffrey immigrated to New Zealand in 1950, growing up in the Devonport naval base in Auckland, then the coal mining town of Blackball on the West Coast of the South Island. He has worked as a sheep-shearer, postman, psychiatric social worker and bookseller.

Jeffrey’s poems have been published in various anthologies, whilst his stories and poems have been published in Landfall and the NZ Listener. His poetry collection As Big as a Father was longlisted for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards (2003). In 2007, Jeffrey and Martin Edmond won the Copyright Licensing Limited Award giving them $35,000 each towards a non-fiction project. Best of Both Worlds: The Story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau, was published by Penguin in 2010. Jeffrey was the 2011 Waikato University Writer-in-Residence and in the same year shortlisted for the Ernest-Scott History prize, Australia. In 2012, he was awarded the Creative New Zealand University of Iowa Residency. The resulting book, The Lost Pilot: A Memoir was published by Penguin NZ (2013). In 2014, Jeffrey travelled to Berlin on a Goethe-Institute scholarship, pursuing research for his current project, a family history based on links with his German relations.

In March of this year, Jeffrey is leaving his post at the University of Canterbury, to write from home and concentrate on the above project, now figured as a verse novel, The Bywater File. He will also continue with his work in Christchurch Mens’ Prison (Paparua), a reading group with prisoners which takes place every Friday in the prison library. The group – He Pukapuka Kōrero – consists of Bernadette Hall, Jeni Curtis, himself, and until recently, Teoti Jardine.

Jeffrey’s recent poetry collections include, SHAKEN DOWN 6.3: Poems from the Second Christchurch Earthquake (CUP, 2012), Blood Ties: New and Selected Poems (CUP, 2017) and Dylan Junkie (Makaro Press, 2017). In his memoir Now When it Rains (Steele Roberts, 2018), Jeffrey examines  70 years lived through rapid social changes and personal upheavals, from the 1950s to the 2000s.

After Hours Trading & The Flying Squad (Carbide Press, 2021) is a poetry collection  in two halves: a poetic evocation of forgotten South Island histories; and a selection on a wide variety of styles and themes including homages to some of Jeffrey’s favourite writers – Marilynne Robinson, Max Sebald, amongst others – and salutes to friends and loved ones, tā moko artists, old shearing mates, as well as the birds and animals who are also his whānau members, the wild and the tame.

Jeffrey’s latest work Lily, Oh Lily: Searching for a Nazi Ghost (Canterbury UP, 2024) explores how family histories illuminate both past and present.

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Jeffrey Holman’s blog

Twitter:@poppenz

Penguin Books (NZ) author page

Jeffrey Holman’s Tapa Notebook online (NZEPC)

ANZRB review of Lily, Oh Lily (Oct, 2024)

Radio NZ interview discussing After Hours Trading & The Flying Squad (Nov, 2021)

NZ Booklovers review of After Hours Trading & The Flying Squad (Nov, 2021)

Jeffrey at the Blackball Readers and Writers Festival (July, 2018)

New Zealand Books Pukapuka Aotearoa review by Murray Bramwell – a twinned discussion of Blood Ties and Dylan Junkie (Nov 2017)

University of Canterbury Quake Studies author page [with poetry samples] (2014)

Landfall review of The Lost Pilot (Feb, 2014)

Jeffrey introduces The Lost Pilot in Elseware (July, 2013)

Radio New Zealand interview regarding The Lost Pilot (May, 2013)

 

Poet and fiction writer Alison Wong is a fourth generation Chinese New Zealander living in Geelong, Australia. She has written a novel, poetry collection and been widely published in a multitude of journals and anthologies. The Irish Times described her prose as ‘delicately told…brilliantly plotted…there is an unusual intelligence about this subtle, crafted novel that forces one to stop and absorb the enormity of the smallest gesture.’ The New Zealand Poetry Society described her poetry as ‘filled with a resonant rich imagery, often connected to her Chinese/New Zealand roots’. Reviewer Margaret Christensen wrote: ‘she brings to her emotional references a wry ironic openness… Her mastery of the descriptive phrase, especially in natural settings, is excellent… Wong is a poet to be reckoned with’.­

Among Alison’s numerous accolades, her debut novel, As the Earth Turns Silver (Penguin, 2009; Picador, Australia, 2009 & UK, 2010) won the New Zealand Post Book Award for Fiction (2010), and was shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (2010). It was translated into French, Spanish and Polish. Alison’s poetry collection, Cup (Steele Roberts, 2006), was shortlisted for Best First Book for Poetry at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards (2007). Her poetry was selected for Best New Zealand Poems (2006, 2007 and 2015). She has also been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago (2002). In 2024 Alison was named an Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate, receiving the Burr/Tatham Trust Award in recognition of her contributions to literature.

Alison has a BSc in Mathematics from Victoria University of Wellington and is a graduate of Damien Wilkins’ Original Composition class. She spent several years in China and attended the Shanghai International Writers Programme (2014).

The recent anthology A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (AUP, 2021) co-edited by Alison Wong and Paula Morris, is a landmark collection of poetry, fiction and essays by emerging writers and is the first-ever anthology of Asian New Zealand creative writing.  Alison is also working on a non-fiction book/memoir exploring her experience of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia and China.

 

           

 

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Penguin Books NZ author page

Wikipedia

ANZL review of A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (May, 2021)

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Duncan Sarkies is an award-winning novelist, playwright and screenwriter. His work, heralded by critics for its originality, is best known for its eccentric plots and darkly comic portrayals of ‘the outsider’ and the disturbed.

Duncan’s career has been varied and includes writing the episode, New Fans, for Flight of the Conchords as well as several plays, a short story collection and three novels. He has been a contributor to the American TV series, What We Do in the Shadows since 2019. Linda Herrick of the Weekend Herald describes Sarkies’ 2008 novel, Two Little Boys, as: ‘Quick, clever, twisted, acutely funny…This is the most amazing book. It’s dark, wildly funny, vivid, and brilliantly original.’ Two Little Boys, adapted in 2012 for the screen (starring Hamish Blake and Bret McKenzie) was co-written by Duncan and his brother Robert, as was the massively popular Scarfies. Duncan also wrote and contributed to the writing of four episodes of ABC’s show Maximum Choppage that aired in 2015, and script edited for ABC’s Soul Mates. He was the director, writer and co-creator of The Mysterious Secrets of Uncle Bertie’s Botanarium, a fantasy podcast series. The BBC had considered developing it into a seven-episode series. The first series, ultimately released in 2016 through Howl, has 12 episodes.

Duncan was awarded the Sunday Star Times Bruce Mason Playwriting Award (1994), and the Chapman Tripp Theatre Award for Best New Zealand for Saving Grace (1995). In 1998, he won the Louis Johnson New Writers’ Bursary, and in 2000 his short story collection, Stray Thoughts and Nosebleeds, won the Best First Book of Fiction Award at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. He was one of two recipients awarded the Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship in 2015.

His novel, Demolition of the Century (Penguin, 2013) is a humorous and thoughtful tale of one man’s quest to find his son. The List (UK) writes that ‘Flight of the Conchords fans will take delight in this dark, twisted and idiotically funny novel.’

In 2022 Duncan hosted three online talks with writers Pip Adam, Kirsten McDougall and Rose Lu in the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts, where they discussed their craft, life and where they get their ideas from. Also in 2022, Duncan was announced as a recipient of a 2023 residency at the Michael King Writers Centre, Auckland.

His latest work Stargazers (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2025) is by turns vital, farcical, heartbreaking and chilling. This much-anticipated novel is a wild and tender leap – or, more accurately, pronk – into the heart of alpaca breeding, and a snapshot of a world at a crossroads. Toby Manhire describes it as ‘like Succession, but with alpacas’. Stargazers was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction.

Duncan currently lives in Wellington.

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Wikipedia

Victoria University Press writer page

Penguin Books writer page

NZ Onscreen writer page

Playmarket playwright page

NZ Festival of the Arts interviews with writers Pip Adam, Kirsten McDougall & Rose Lu (March, 2022)

Stuff interview discussing favourite things (March, 2022)

Radio NZ on Duncan’s new graphic novel and radio show Uncle Bertie’s Botanarium with Jemaine Clement (2016)

Stuff.co.nz interview and article (March, 2015)

NZ Listener review of The Demolition of the Century (Aug, 2013)

NZ Listener interview regarding Two Little Boys (Sept, 2012)

Emily Perkins is an internationally published fiction writer. Her first book, Not Her Real Name and Other Stories (VUP and Picador, 1996), won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (UK) and the Montana Award for Best First Book of Fiction (NZ). Her four novels include Novel About My Wife, which won the Montana Book Award (NZ) and the Believer Book of the Year (US). Her novel The Forrests (Bloomsbury, 2012), was selected as a Book of the Year in the Daily Telegraph, Observer, and New Statesman among other venues, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2013 and shortlisted for Best Book of Fiction in the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards.

Emily has written a weekly column for the UK’s Independent on Sunday and a fiction serial for the London Evening Standard. In New Zealand she has hosted the television books programme The Good Word (2006-2011) and since 2013 has been convener of the MA in Fiction at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters.

Emily’s adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was staged in 2015 and she is the co-writer of feature film The Rehearsal, based on the novel by Eleanor Catton. She has held the Buddle Findlay Frank Sargeson Fellowship, is an Arts Foundation Laureate, and member of The Folio Academy of international writers and critics. She is frequently invited to present her work at literary events in New Zealand and abroad and was a member of New Zealand’s 2012 Guest of Honour programme at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In 2017 Emily was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, for services to literature.

Emily’s most recent work Lioness (Bloomsbury, 2023) is a bold new novel about midlife female reckoning. In 2024 Lioness won the country’s richest prize, the Jan Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

 

Links

Emily Perkins’ website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

NZ Arts Foundation writer page

Bloomsbury author page

Stephen Stratford on Alan Duff:

His dark materials: born in 1950 to an abusive, often-drunk Maori mother; diving for pennies at Whakarewarewa; borstal boy (assault; breaking and entering); a brother’s funeral that ends in ‘violent, drunken chaos’; prison in England (forgery).

His light materials: gentle scientist booklover Pakeha father; older brother Nick who gave him Gerald Manley Hopkins to read. ‘These words leaped out at me,’ he says in his 1999 memoir Out of the Mist and Steam. ‘The lights went on… I became instantly certain that I’d write one day, that I’d be published.’

Then came an immersion in Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Styron, books on architecture – but also, crucially, Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn ‘whose stream-of-consciousness style, unconventional punctuation and spelling gave the work a manic energy and immediacy’.

Fast-forward to the launch of Once Were Warriors in 1990. The year before I’d met Alan at my sister’s in Takapuna – Nick Duff is a family friend. We had a long talk about books over the kitchen table. I liked him. A bit intense, but I supposed that’s what you got with authors. The launch at Ellen Melville Hall was the best I have ever attended. There was ‘a bus-load of relatives and whanau from Rotorua’ and huge support from Auckland’s literary community. Almost everyone bought a copy of the hardback – imagine that, a first novel in hardback!

And whew, the book turned out to be good. So good that it became an instant bestseller, was made into a movie, is still in print. My favourite story about it is from a teacher at an Auckland girls’ school: the pupils were told not to read it because Alan Duff was a bad man with wrong ideas. So the book was passed around covertly, samizdat-style, from girl to girl.

And they loved it because it described if not their lives then the lives of kids they knew.

Other novels followed. One Night Out Stealing in 1991, even more technically accomplished with its interweaving narrative voices; What Becomes of the Broken Hearted in 1996 (it won the 1997 Montana NZ Book Award); Szabad in 2001, and more. In 2019, Duff released a non fiction work A Conversation with my Country.

Characters caught between two cultures often feature: in 2008’s Dreamboat Dad, the narrator is the child of a Maori woman from Rotorua and a US soldier visiting during World War II. The other major theme is machismo and male violence. In Szabad, set in Hungary in the 1950s, rage itself is an entity, the narrator says, ‘who has long resided in me and threatens to take over’. Balancing this is respect for women as a force for good and empathy, notably Merita and Lena in Dreamboat Dad and Beth in the Heke trilogy. I’ve stood beside Alan while he received a (justified) dressing-down from a sister-in-law. He took it. He actually walks the talk with this stuff and I admire him for that, even more than I admire his writing.

And then there is Books in Homes. You can read all about it elsewhere but it was his idea, executed brilliantly by Christine Fernyhough, and to date has got more than ten million books into the kind of homes that Alan’s novels depict. Few writers really make a difference. Alan Duff has.

 

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Bio

Alan Duff is the author of eleven novels, also a memoirist, commentator and founder of Duffy Books In Homes. He has written for radio and as a regular newspaper columnist. Son of scientist Gowan Duff and Kuia Hinau (of Ngāti Rangitihi and Tūwharetoa), he has been an outspoken commentator on Māori affairs, and was the driving force behind the Books in Homes scheme, which aims to make books available to underprivileged children at minimal cost.

Alan has written numerous successful books both New Zealand based and overseas. His most well-known draw upon his own childhood experiences. His first published novel Once Were Warriors (1990) was a huge success, winning the PEN Best First Book Award, runner-up in the Goodman Fielder Wattie Award, and was subsequently made into an internationally acclaimed film, for which he wrote the original screenplay. In 2003 Once Were Warriors was also brought to the stage across New Zealand as a musical drama. A raw and powerful portrayal of Māori in New Zealand society Once Were Warriors is regarded as a New Zealand classic. The sequel to Once Were Warriors, his book What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? (1996) was the winner of the fiction section of the 1997 Montana Book Awards and was also made into a film of the same title.

 

Accolades

Montana Fiction Book of the Year Award for What Becomes of the Broken Hearted  (1997)

PEN Best First Book

Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship (1991)

Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards, second place for Once Were Warriors (1991)

 

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Wikipedia

Penguin Books author page

Duffy Books in Homes – the Alan Duff Charitable Foundation

Stuff review of A Conversation With My Country (July, 2019)

Radio NZ interview discussing A Conversation With My Country (June, 2019)

NZ Herald article and extract from A Conversation With My Country (June, 2019)