Academy of New Zealand Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links

Visit Maggie’s website

Read Maggie’s blog

Maggie on Twitter and Facebook

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Random House author page

Mākaro Press author page

ANZL review of Formica (Dec, 2022)

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

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

Landfall review of Daughters of Messene (May, 2016)

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

Sue Orr is an award winning author of two short story collections, Etiquette for a Dinner Party and From Under the Overcoat, and two novels The Party Line and Loop Track. Author Fiona Kidman wrote: ‘Sue Orr’s stories have that mesmerising quality that makes the reader race on, hoping they will never end, yet desperate to find out what happens next…I admire these stories immensely: by turn tender, sly, comic, and always deeply informed about the ways of the human heart’.

Sue’s first novel The Party Line (Vintage , 2015) was a New Zealand best seller for five months and published in 25 countries. Her collection Etiquette for a Dinner Party (Penguin Random House, 2008) won the Lilian Ida Smith Award in 2007, and From Under the Overcoat (Penguin Random House, 2011) was shortlisted for the NZ Post Book Awards 2012, and won the People’s Choice Award. Her short fiction has also been published in New Zealand and international anthologies, translated into Spanish and been optioned for film.

In 2011, Sue was a Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow. She has a background in feature-writing journalism, and occasionally writes and reviews for periodicals such as NZ Listener, Metro and The Spinoff. This work has included an essay for Metro on Rachel Barrowman’s biography of Maurice Gee (September, 2015) and an extensive interview with author Michel Faber for The Listener (April, 2016). She has experience at interviewing and has also read, chaired or performed at a variety of national literary festivals.

In 2016, Sue established a creative writing programme for Women’s Refuge in Auckland. On moving to Wellington in 2018, she joined the Write Where You Are Charitable Trust to teach creative writing in Wellington prisons and women’s refuges. Currently Sue teaches creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, and holds a PhD and Masters in Creative Writing from that university.

Sue’s latest work Loop Tracks (VUP, 2021) is a New Zealand novel written in real time against the progress of the Covid-19 pandemic and the New Zealand General Election and euthanasia referendum.

Links

Sue on Twitter

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Victoria University Press writer page

Penguin Random House author page

Radio New Zealand review of The Party Line (Sept, 2015)

Stuff review of The Party Line (26 Sept, 2015)

Stuff review of The Party Line (20 Sept, 2015)

NZ Herald review of The Party Line (Sept, 2015)

NZ Listener review of The Party Line (Aug, 2015)

NZ Listener review of From Under The Overcoat (July, 2012)

Drawing on a varied background, Pat White has crafted an extensive body of poetry and creative nonfiction that reflects his love for the natural environment. Vincent O’Sullivan described Pat’s work as ‘poetry with its eye on “real things” – on work, on weather, on love, on finding the right name for things at the moment they are slipping away … with the everyday presented as the rare privilege it is.’  John Horrocks described Pat’s poems as ‘drawn from a lifetime of immersion in the natural world and its rhythms. Pat White is among the very few New Zealand writers who can speak to this experience.’

Pat has worked as a dairy farmer, teacher, librarian, shepherd, tertiary art lecturer as well as other jobs. A parallel career as a landscape painter has added depth to his sense of place.

His experience as a writer has included running workshops, involvement in the Wairarapa Poems in the Vines festivals, giving readings, and promoting the work of others. He has been a participant in various national festivals and was invited to attend the Watermark Muster, Australia, as the only international guest. Pat has been awarded several residencies. Most recently, he and wife Catherine Day donated proceeds from his book Fracking & Hawk to the creation of a Creative Writing Award for senior students at Mackenzie College, Fairlie.

In 2010 Pat published his powerful and moving memoir How the Land Lies: Of Longing and Belonging through Victoria University Press.

 Notes From the Margins: The West Coast’s Peter Hooper (Alexandra: Frontiers Press, 2017) is Pat’s work on the life of author Peter Hooper (1919-1991).

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Victoria University Press author page

Cold Hub Press author page

takehē review of Fracking & Hawk (April, 2016)

Landfall review of Fracking & Hawk (April, 2016)

Charlotte Grimshaw is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels and outstanding collections of linked stories, which have been published in New Zealand, the UK and Canada. As a reviewer in The New Zealand Listener noted: ‘A swarming energy pervades every page she writes . . . her descriptive writing has always been of the highest order. Most of it would work just as well as poetry’.

Charlotte has been a double finalist and prize winner in the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition, and in 2006 she won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award. She has received the Buddle Finlay Sargeson Fellowship, and in 2007 she won a Book Council Six Pack prize. Her story collection, Opportunity, was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O’Connor International Prize, and in 2008 it won New Zealand’s premier Montana Award for Fiction or Poetry. She was also the 2008 Montana Book Reviewer of the Year. Her story collection Singularity was shortlisted for the 2009 Frank O’Connor International Prize, and the South East Asia and Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Charlotte’s fourth novel, The Night Book, was shortlisted for the New Zealand Post Book Award. Her monthly column in Metro magazine won a Qantas Media Award in 2009, and in 2016 Charlotte was a finalist in the Canon Media Awards for Book Reviewer of the Year. She was the 2023 recipient prestigious of the Catherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship.

Commenting in the Guardian, Jane Campion said: ‘She is a master of mystery, very contemporary and astute. Her language is relaxed, spare and perfect’.

Charlotte’s omnibus edition The Bad Seed combines her two highly acclaimed novels The Night Book and Soon. Now a major TV drama series, these two connected novels take an unflinching look at politics and power, contemporary New Zealand society and the arid morality of the privileged.

Her memoir The Mirror Book is a vivid account of a New Zealand upbringing, where rebellion was encouraged, where trouble and tragedy lay ahead. It looks beyond the public face to the ‘messy reality of family life – and much more’. The Mirror Book was shortlisted for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for General Non-Fiction.

Part psychological thriller, part family saga, her latest work The Black Monk is a daring novel that examines the themes of the moment: shame, addiction, truth and the stories we tell to survive.

A full list of Charlotte Grimshaw’s titles, reviews and selected Metro columns can be found on her website.

Links

Charlotte’s website

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Random House Books author page

ANZRB review of Black Monk (March, 2026)

Ockham New Zealand Book Awards shortlist announced (Mar, 2022)

ANZL review of The Mirror Book (April, 2021)

Metro review of Starlight Peninsula (Aug, 2015)

New Zealand Books review of Soon (March, 2013)

James Norcliffe has published eleven collections of poetry, a short story collection, several award-winning novels for young people and an adult novel The Frog Prince. ‘It is clear,’ reviewer Trevor Agnew (Christchurch Press) wrote of his prose, ‘that a master storyteller is at work from the first sentence’. James has won a number of awards for both his poetry and prose. With Bernadette Hall, he was presented with a Press Literary Liaisons Honour Award for lasting contribution to literature in the South Island, New Zealand. In 2022 James received the prestigious Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. More recently he was awarded the Storylines Childrens Literature Charitable Trust 2023 Margaret Mahy Medal.

James had a long time involvement with takahē magazine and has edited anthologies of poetry, and writing by young people, notably (with Tessa Duder) the long running ReDraft annual anthologies. Most recently he has edited (with Harry Ricketts and Siobhan Harvey) the major anthology Essential New Zealand Poems – Facing the Empty Page (Godwit/Random, 2014), and with Joanna Preston Leaving the Red Zone – Poems from the Canterbury Earthquakes (Clerestory Press, 2016).

James has been awarded writing fellowships both in New Zealand and overseas including the Burns Fellowship, the IWP/Iowa Residency, and residencies in Hobart, Massey University and Otago University College of Education. He publishes poetry widely internationally, and regularly reads at festivals and occasions throughout New Zealand and overseas: most recently the Queensland Poetry Festival (2008), in Medellin, Colombia, for the International Poetry Festival (2010), and in Quebec at the Trois Rivieres International Poetry Festival (2011). His work is published in journals world-wide and has been translated into several languages. In 2018 he was the Creative New Zealand Randell Cottage Writing Fellow.

His Letter to ‘Oumuamua (2023) is a wry and witty poetry collection addressed to the first interstellar object ever to be detected in our solar system. Our foibles and absurdities are laid bare, but so too is the human capacity for love, desire, sorrow and regret.

His most recent work,  A Day Like No Other (2026), gathers poems from his remarkable career, which includes eleven collections spanning nearly four decades. A beautifully designed and artfully curated volume, A Day Like No Other will be read and re-read for generations, and is a must-have for confirmed Norcliffe fans and Norcliffe newbies alike.

Links

James Norcliffe’s website

Twitter:@jamesnorcliffe

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Victoria University Press author page

Random House Books author page

Virtual Learning Network author page and bibliography

NZ Prime Minster’s Award for Literary Acheivement 2022 – Recipients announced (Dec, 2022)

ANZL review of The Frog Prince (Feb, 2022)

Interview with Rebecca Styles in Flash Frontier [with Elizabeth Smither] (2016)

Radio New Zealand interview with Wallace Chapman [with Joanna Preston] on Leaving the Red Zone (2016)

Article in Jacket on James Norcliffe, David Howard & David Eggleton by Vaughan Rapatahana (2015)

Interview with akiwisbookreviews (blog) on Felix and the Red Rats (2014)

First published at the age of twenty-three, Anna Livesey is a poet and short story writer who has been described by Peter Bland in the New Zealand Listener as possessing ‘a real talent for the imaginative treatment of found material’, and by poet Saradha Koirala as ‘satisfyingly personal and reflective’.

Born and raised in Wellington, Anna studied at Victoria University where she completed an MA in Creative Writing (2002). Since then, Anna’s work has been published in various magazines and journals, including Turbine, Landfall, Sport and takahē. Her work featured in Best New Zealand Poems (2003, 2005, and 2010), and she edited the poetry collection The Enormous Picture (2004).

She was a recipient of the MacMillan Brown Prize (2000 and 2002), and the Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Novice Category Award (2003). She won the Schaeffer Fellowship in 2003, enabling her to spend a year studying at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Anna has published four poetry collections to date: Napier (2002), Good Luck (2003), The Moonmen (2010) and Ordinary Time (2017).

Links

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Radio New Zealand interview (2013)

Victoria University Press author page

NZ Electronic Poetry Centre poet page

Frankie McMillan is a New Zealand writer who has published six books of poetry and fiction. My Mother and the Hungarians, and other small fictions (Canterbury University Press), which was longlisted for the Ockham Award for fiction. She has twice won the New Zealand Flash Fiction Day competition and also won the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship (2019), the Michael King writing residency at the University of Auckland (2017), Ursula Bethell residency in creative writing at the University of Canterbury (2014) and the CNZ Todd New Writer’s Bursary (2005). Her work was selected for two consecutive years for Best New Zealand Fiction anthologies (2008 & 2009) and Best New Zealand Poems in both 2013 and 2015 (online, Victoria University).

Her short story collection, The Bag Lady’s Picnic and other stories, was published in 2001 by Shoal Bay Press. ‘This writing and these stories,’ Weekend Herald Penelope Bieder wrote, ‘announce the arrival of a strong new voice on the New Zealand literary scene’. Frankie’s first poetry collection, Dressing for the Cannibals (Sudden Valley Press, 2009), was described by Christchurch Press Book News as ‘full of surprises that quicken the heart as well as the head’. Glasgow Review of Books described her second collection, There are no horses in heaven (Canterbury UP, 2015), as the ‘most startling poetry book I have read for years’. Frankie’s fifth collection The Father of Octopus Wrestling, and other small fictions (CUP, 2019) was listed by The Spinoff as one of the 10 best New Zealand fiction books of 2019 and shortlisted for the NZSA Heritage Book Awards.

Frankie’s latest work The Wandering Nature of Us Girls (CUP, 2022) was published with the support of Creative New Zealand. In settings as unexpected as a European post-war circus or an inflatable pool in suburban Aotearoa, the enduring bonds of family, real or imagined, take centre stage. Frankie has given us a collection that is poignant, revelatory and bitter sweet, a collection which balances transgression and wit, showing a cast of unmoored characters with her signature warmth and compassion.

Frankie teaches at the Hagley Writers’ Institute in Christchurch. She spends her time between Ōtautahi Christchurch and Mohua Golden Bay.

Links

Canterbury University Press writer page

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Hagley Writers’ Institute website

Radio NZ interview discussing The Father of Octupus Wrestling, Frankie’s new novella and her Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship (Sept, 2019)

NZ Poetry Shelf review  of The Father of Octopus Wrestling (Oct, 2019)

NZ Poetry Shelf review of My Mother and the Hungarians (Oct, 2016)

NZ Listener review of My Mother and the Hungarians (Oct, 2016)

Radio New Zealand interview  (Aug, 2014)

Radio New Zealand interview discussing flash fiction and playful poetry (Sept, 2013)

Paul Thomas is the author of eight crime novels, a collection of short stories and author/co-author of nine sports books. He has been described as ‘the Godfather of New Zealand crime fiction’ for his series featuring Maori detective Tito Ihaka. He is a regular columnist for the NZ Herald (current affairs) and NZ Listener (sport), and has had short stories and serials published in numerous magazines and newspapers including the NZ Herald, the Sydney Morning Herald and Metro. He has appeared regularly at a variety of national literary events.

Paul’s first novel Old School Tie (1994), caused a considerable stir. The late Nigel Cox described it as ‘as significant a debut as The Bone People – and with jokes.’ Inside Dope and Guerilla Season (1996) followed in quick succession, and together the three novels were a major catalyst of the subsequent flowering of New Zealand crime fiction.

Paul’s second Ihaka novel, Inside Dope (1995), won the Crime Writers’ Association of Australia’s inaugural Ned Kelly award for Crime Novel of the Year. The fourth novel, Death on Demand (2012), won the Ngaio Marsh Award and was UK crime fiction guru Mike Ripley’s 2013 crime novel of the year. Fallout (2014) was shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award. The Ihaka novels have been translated into several languages and published in a number of countries. Paul also wrote the screenplay for the tele-movie Ihaka: Blunt Instrument (2000).

He is about to start the sixth – and possibly last – Ihaka novel which will pick up and resolve the threads running through Death on Demand and Fallout, thus being the final book in a genuine trilogy.

Links

Paul’s website for full list of works and excerpts

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

Upstart Press author page

NZ Listener interview (Dec, 2013)

Graeme Lay was born in Foxton in 1944 and raised in Taranaki. An editor and prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction, he has published or anthologised over forty works, including novels for adults and young adults, short story collections and travel writing. He has been Books Editor for North & South magazine, and for over twenty years was secretary of the Frank Sargeson Trust.

Graeme began writing short stories in the late 1970s. His first novel, The Mentor, was published in 1978 and his first collection of short stories, Dear Mr Cairney, in 1985. Since then he has won the Lilian Ida Smith Award (1988), and was named Reviewer of the Year at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards (1998). Graeme is a three-time finalist in the New Zealand Travel Writer of the Year Award. He has also twice been a finalist in the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards, and was included on the 2002 Storylines Notable Senior Fiction List. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he devised and edited five collections of New Zealand short stories.

From the 1990s onwards, after travelling to New Caledonia and Rarotonga, Graeme developed a deep interest in the islands of the South Pacific and the history and culture of that region’s peoples. Many of his books, both fiction and non-fiction, are set in the South Pacific. His latest novels, a trilogy based on the life of the famous English explorer James Cook, all became best sellers. They were: The Secret Life of James Cook (2012), James Cook’s New World (2013), and James Cook’s Lost World (2015).

Graeme’s most recent work is 100 Days that Mapped a Nation (New Holland, 2019), a commemerative Edition of Captain James Cook’s Voyages to New Zealand and the South Pacific. He is currently working on a novel based on the life of the young Joseph Banks.

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Links:

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

New Holland author page

HarperCollins author page

Awa Press author page

Radio NZ interview: Graeme discusses Fletcher the Bounty (Aug, 2017)

NZ Herald review of The Secret Life of James Cook (May, 2013)

Flash Frontier interview (Jan, 2012)

Janis Freegard is a writer of fiction and poetry. Her fiction is mostly contemporary realism, aimed at adults, but she also writes magic realism and speculative fiction. Her most recent work Wild, Wild Women (AT THE BAY | I TE KOKORU, 2024) is a collection of short stories, sometimes touching, sometimes troubling, introducing us to women who don’t stand still: scandalous women, runaway women, daring women. Her most recent poetry collection, Reading the Signs (Cuba Press, 2020) is a series of linked poems that are thoughtful and humorous, provocative and tender, and come together as a quiet epic about a planet that is fast running out of puff. Prior to this were her novel, The Year of Falling (Mākaro Press, 2015), and three more poetry collections, The Glass Rooster (Auckland University Press, 2015), The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider (Poetry chapbook: Anomalous Press, US, 2013), and Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus (Auckland UP, 2011).

Janis’ poetry mixes science with surrealism and frequently makes use of constraints. Of her first full-length poetry collection, Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus, Emma Neale (NZ Listener) wrote ‘…the collection is as much about human follies, infringements, betrayals and tenderness as it is about the habits and habitats of our animal cousins’. In New Zealand Books, Charlotte Simmonds described The Glass Rooster as ‘a strong, mature, vivid collection of poetry with warmth and impact’. The Year of Falling was described as ‘an immediately readable book’ (David Hill, NZ Herald), and ‘a superb first foray into novel writing’ (Siobhan Harvey, Dominion Post).

In 2001, Janis won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award and in 2014 she was awarded the Ema Saikō Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Hallelujah for 50ft Women (Bloodaxe Books, UK), the NZ Listener, 100 Short Short Stories New Zealand 4 and Essential Poems of New Zealand. Several of her short stories and poems have been broadcast on National Radio. She won the Geometry | Open Book Poetry Competition and the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award, and was the inaugural Ema Saikō Poetry Fellow in the Wairarapa. Janis also performs with the Meow Gurrrls poetry collective.

Born in the United Kingdom, Janis grew up in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. She has degrees in science and public management. She lives in Wellington and works in the state sector.

Links

Janis Freegard’s website (full list of published short stories & poems)

Janis Freegard’s blog

Twitter:@janisfreegard

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura writer page

New Zealand Society of Authors writer page

Auckland University Press author page

Mākaro Press author page

Dominion Post review of the Year of Falling (Sept, 2015)

NZ Herald review of The Year of Falling (Sept, 2015)

Greg O’Brien’s comments on a poem on the ‘Best American Poems’ blog (June, 2014)

NZ Poetry Shelf review of The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider (Oct, 2013)

NZ Listener review of Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus (Dec, 2011)

Kingdom Animalia on NZ Listener’s 100 best books list of 2011 (Nov, 2011)

NZ Herald review of Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus  (Nov, 2011)

Radio New Zealand interview with Lynn Freeman on ‘Standing Room Only’

Radio New Zealand interview on ‘Our Changing World’

Home-made video reading from Alice Spider