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One for the history books
Renowned New Zealand historian and writer, James Belich, has his latest book
Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the
Anglo-world reviewed by The Times' Bernard Porter, who believes
Belich's fresh approach to old ideas have created a provocative and compelling
read. "This is one of the most important works on the broad processes of
modern world history to have appeared for years — arguably since Sir Charles
Dilke's pioneering Greater Britain introduced a concept very like Belich's
"Anglo-world" to his Victorian contemporaries in 1868," writes
Porter. The crux of the book sets out to uncouple the terms 'setterlism' and
'imperialism' ("the most valuable insight of the book"), "to free
the former from some of the stigmas attaching to the latter'" Belich deals
with most of them, and one in particular: the injury (to put it mildly) done to
most of the indigenous races that stood in the settlers' path. "[Replenishing
the Earth] is written with verve and wit. Reading it is almost bound to
undermine old assumptions, and to suggest radically new ways of thinking about
why we are where we are (many of us), in the "Anglo-world",
today."
(23 September 2009)
War stories recounted
Bluff-born journalist Peter Arnett was the VIP guest speaker at a recent
function to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Caravelle Hotel in Ho Chi Minh
City (Saigon). The Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, who filed more than 3,000
stories on the Vietnam War for the Associated Press between 1962 and 1975,
witnessed many significant historical events during this time — often from the
rooftop of the iconic hotel. Arnett recalls watching the 1963 coup d'etat
against southern leader Ngo Dinh Diem. "During a lull in the shooting I
made my way to the Caravelle," he said. "The rumours and the
speculation of the months past were coming true before my eyes and I watched it
all, with a glass of Johnny Walker Red Label in one hand, a cigarette in the
other." The day that Saigon (Ho Chi Minh) fell, Arnett was also at the
Caravelle. At the 50th Anniversary he recounted the morning, quoting from his
autobiography. "I shaved and showered in cold water and selected a grey
proletarian shirt of the new city masters. I headed upstairs to the dining room,
doubtful that breakfast would be served. But I was wrong. The waiters were on
duty as usual."
(11 May 2009)
Coastal reflections
On March 1910 Katherine Mansfield arrived at the English seaside town of
Rottingdean in Sussex where she took a room above the local grocer. While
Mansfield craved library books "the sun shone and the sea breezes filled
the house. She had not been able to sit on the shore and listen to the sea since
she left Day's Bay in New Zealand." A century later residents of
Rottingdean are petitioning to commemorate this crucial sojourn. The only
recorded grocer, Mrs Tickner's premises, await the 1911 census's full details,
and if the cottage remains elusive, the sheep-filled opening of At the Bay
could be as much Rottingdean as the Antipodes, where "the leaping,
glittering sea was so bright it made one's eyes ache to look at it".
Mansfield died in Fontainebleu, France in 1923, aged 34.
(23 December 2008)
Enchantment for sharing
Children's writer Margaret Mahy, recipient of the Carnegie Medal for Children's
Literature, the Hans Christian Andersen Medal and a host of other awards, says
the shared experience of a parent reading to a child is precious. Her new young
adult novel, The Magician of Hoad, was released last month after a
writing process that took two decades. It is a mythical yarn about an innocent
farm boy who can read minds, leading him to advise the king of a war-torn land.
She has just read the first published copy. "I knew parts of it very well,
of course, but it almost felt like I was reading someone else's book for the
first time. That's quite a unique experience for a writer. Once your book is
printed, it takes on a different identity. But after all these years, I still
enjoy seeing my name on the cover. I study it carefully to remind myself that I
was the one who wrote the book." Mahy is a member of the Order of New
Zealand. She lives on Banks Peninsula.
(9 January 2009)
Figments of the imagination
Wellington author Elizabeth Knox's Dreamhunter Duet is reviewed in
Canadian newspaper The Star Phoenix. The two "intricate"
fantasy titles are highly recommended for young adults, and are described as
"intriguing" and "intelligent". The first of the two books,
and "a gripping ride", is Dreamhunter. In the second, Dreamquake,
"the plot continues to hold, and readers become disturbed by what seems
more and more plausible within the context of Knox's fine writing. Rising above
a simple mystery into an intense myth of place, some challenging questions are
raised about power and freedom, artistic license, and the role of the
storyteller ... With these books, Knox takes her place beside fine fantasy
writers Susan Cooper, Mollie Hunter, Lloyd Alexander, Kenneth Oppel, Philip
Pullman, and Garth Nix." Both titles have won Best Book awards from the
American Library Association as well as a variety of honours in New
Zealand.
(9 August 2008)
Sausage Day cinema
Janet Frame was a waitress at Dunedin's Grand Hotel when she wrote A Night at
the Opera, until now unknown, thought to be written in 1954, and this month
published in the latest issue of The New Yorker. A Night at the Opera
is set in Park House which squats opposite the door of a hospital kitchen,
"like a dirty brick imbecile waiting for food." The patients include a
pair of Christs, a Queen of Norway, Millie and Elna. One day in early summer,
the Park House Superintendent becomes "determined about the New
Attitude" and it is decided to screen films in the dayroom "after the
more violently uncontrollable patients had been put to bed." The first
screening, the attendant announces on Tuesday, is The Marx Brothers in A
Night at the Opera. Frame's novel Towards Another Summer - a novel
deemed too personal for publication in her lifetime - is released in the UK in
early July. Virago editor Donna
Coonan says: "I was bowled over by the lyrical beauty of her writing,
and by how vivid and alive it is, and how courageous; there really isn't a shred
of self-pity. What is most remarkable, though, is her humour."
(2 June 2008)
Castaway tales from edge of the world
The latest book by Wellington maritime historian Joan
Druett uses personal memoirs to recount two very different survival stories
on the Auckland Islands, 500km south of NZ. Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked
on the Edge of the World tells the tale of two British ships stranded on
opposite sides of the main island in 1864, and the wildly different experiences
had by their respective crews. "If the southern part of Auckland Island is
all Robinson Crusoe," writes the Toronto Star reviewer,
"the northern part is more Lord of the Flies." Druett has
written ten non-fiction books and seven novels, most of which share a historical
maritime theme. Almost all her works have been published first in the US, where
she has received numerous awards. Her 1998 book Hen Frigates won a place
in the New York Public Library's list of Twenty-Five Best Books to
Remember.
(4 August 2007)
Top shelf Wellington author
Lloyd Jones has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize overall best book award for
his novel Mister Pip. The NZ $27,400 cheque was presented to Jones at the
Calabash Literary Festival in St Elizabeth, Jamaica, along with an invitation
for tea with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Described by the Prize's chief
judge as "mesmerising", Mister Pip is a story about the transformative
power of literature set in war-torn Bougainville in the early 1990s. "There
are so many books in the world and it's hard for each of them to find any
space," said Jones. "Competitions like this, with some prestige,
suddenly put that book up in its own little shelf, as it were." Jones
became known as NZ's first "million dollar author" with the foreign
rights sale for Mister Pip. He leaves for Germany next month to begin a Creative
New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency.
(3 June 2007)
The way of Music
The Way of Music by Robin Maconie (pictured), a New Zealand born composer
and musicologist who studied with Olivier Messiaen and Karlheinz Stockhausen, is
a listener's guide to the hidden meanings of western classical music, language
and drawing on universal listening experiences and skills. It is a study guide
in hearing and communication processes (using the example of a barking dog eg
“In a bark, a dog exists”), acoustics and performance, a history of western
music and culture through a survey of 100+ examples of recorded music, and
class, gender, and cultural perspectives found in adult responses to the slow
movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4. Published by Maryland’s
Scarecrow Press, The Way of Music is another instalment in Robin Maconie’s
programme to provide New Zealand with a core classic music textbook collection.
(May 2007)
NZ escapes "affluenza" virus
NZ gets off relatively
lightly in UK psychologist Oliver James's treatise on rampant materialism, Affluenza:
How to be Successful and Stay Sane. James defines affluenza as an unhealthy
obsession with wealth which has led to epidemic levels of depression,
over-consumption and spiritual emptiness in the developed world. To research the
book, James interviewed 240 people in the US, Singapore, Australia, China,
Denmark, NZ and the UK. After spending three months in NZ in 2004 he found its
citizens to be comparatively unaffected by what he terms "selfish
capitalism." "The New Zealanders are the most individualistic nation
on earth, even more so than the Americans," he writes. "But I suspect
New Zealand individualism takes a much more genuine form than that confected in
America." The publication of Affluenza in NZ has caused widespread media
speculation as to who the prominent interviewees really are.
(27 January 2007)
Darkly brilliant
Award-winning NZ author Carl Shuker has released his second novel to
immediate acclaim. Set in NZ, The Lazy Boys is a harrowing account of a group of
friends spiralling out of control during their first year at university.
Shuker's US publisher Shoemaker & Hoard describes the book as "a punch
in the stomach, a sustained cry; as harsh as Less Than Zero, as brutal as A
Clockwork Orange." Shuker discusses his novel's difficult gestation in NZ's
Herald on Sunday: "I wrote this book during a very dark time in my life,
and when it was finished, I was a very dark person ... The novel had been such a
trauma to finish that when I did so, I still remember counting the hours of
peace." A graduate of Bill Manhire's creative writing course at Victoria
University, Shuker won NZ's 2006 Glen Schaeffer Prize in Modern Letters for his
debut novel, The Method Actors.
(10 December 2006)
The case for the code
The man behind international best-seller The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown, will face
a High Court action brought by the authors of the non-fictional
work The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982). The latter's authors, Richard
Leigh (UK) and Michael Baigent (NZ), claim that Brown's fictional blockbuster is
based on their decade of research. Michael Baigent (pictured) is a prolific New
Zealand writer who has authored and co-authored numerous works. He graduated
with a BA in Psychology from Canterbury University, Christchurch.
(24 October 2005)
This case was later dismissed. Read
update
Career ready for take off
Departure Lounge, the latest novel by Auckland writer Chad Taylor, has garnered
praise abroad for its cool, noir aesthetics. The Sydney Morning Herald calls
Taylor "impressive," while the review by Washington Post senior
critic, Jonathan Yardley, is an all-out rave: "Departure Lounge is smart,
original, surprising and just about as cool as a novel can get … A lovely
piece of work that leaves one hoping more of Taylor's writing finds its way to
this side of the Pacific."
(4 May 2006)
Alternative History 101
Historian Gavin Menzies recently visited NZ to promote his controversial
bestseller 1421. One of the most contentious
theories in the book is that NZ was mapped and settled by Chinese 300 years
before the arrival of Captain Cook, and that Maori are the result of
interbreeding between these Chinese settlers and their Melanesian slaves. While
Menzies' theories have gained some ground with fellow researchers of early
Chinese settlements, such as authors Paul Chiasson and Gary Geddes, and have a
massive online following, most academics dismiss his claims as at the least
pseudoscience, at the most "a disgrace" (Michael King in the
Listener).
(27 May 2006)
Analysing the “yucky side of life”
John Crace interviews Joanna Bourke,
lecturer, historian and author of numerous academic books including the
controversial An Intimate History of Killing and her most recent
publication, Fear: A Cultural History. “Historians tend to come in two
sizes: the micro-specialists and those who prefer a broader canvas. Joanna
Bourke leaves you in no doubt where her sympathies lie. ‘I'm not one for writing
the same book over and over again,’ she says breezily. ‘Others can correct any
mistakes I've made. Life's too short for second editions.’” Bourke was born to
NZ missionary parents, raised in the Soloman Islands and Haiti, and studied at
Auckland University before moving to England.
(15 March 2005)
Words as music
Whale Rider’s US paperback release garnered further praise for author
Witi Ihimaera. “Some writers create such beautiful prose that it might be
poetry or music. Witi Ihimaera …
is one such writer.”
(5 December 2004)
Edgy heroine
Fay Weldon’s autobiography - Auto Da
Fay – featured in the New York Times’ New and Noteworthy Paperbacks
section. “Unlike many of the female characters in her dozens of breezy novels,
Weldon comes off as a no-nonsense, pragmatic, resilient heroine in her own life
story […] Although she ends her book just at the point when her career is about
to take hold, her story of a lost girl on her way to finding herself winds up
having heft as well as lift.”
(27 June 2004)
"The most influential American criminologist of his time"
Pioneering criminologist and novelist,
Norval Morris, has died in Chicago aged 80. Born in Auckland, Morris studied in
Australia, France, and England before embarking on his 30-year academic career
at the University of Chicago in 1964. As well as penning numerous acclaimed
works of non-fiction and fiction, Morris founded the Melbourne University
Criminology Department, the UN Institute in Tokyo, the Centre for Criminal
Studies in Chicago, and the world's preeminent criminology journal, Crime and
Justice: A Review of Research. According to the Guardian, "He
was an institution-builder of unmatched influence, and his ideas about
punishment have transformed the ways people think."
(9 April 2004)
Edge hero brought to life
Ernest Rutherford takes centre stage in
Irish writer Brian Cathcart's latest book,
The Fly
in the Cathedral:
How a small group of
Cambridge scientists won the race to split the atom. Rutherford is described
by Cathcart as "the battleship of physics" in what
Popular Science
calls "a fascinating story [told] superbly well."
(7 March 2004)
Comic genius
Martin Emond, internationally renowned
comic-book artist, illustrator, and tattooist, died in LA on March 19 aged 34.
Emond created the popular character Switchblade (star of NZ clothing brand
Illicit) and the acclaimed White Trash and Rolling Red Knuckles
series, the latter of which earned him a cult following in Japan. An inspiration
to his Kiwi contemporaries, Emond worked with US giants Marvel and DC Comics,
and collaborated with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles creator Kevin Eastman,
hardcore rocker Glen Danzig, and Tundra’s Gordon Rennie. He was working on an
animated version of Rolling Red Knuckles for Pirate.Net, a subsidiary of
Fox TV, when he died. Silver Bullet described him as “a prolific creator
who worked to support up and coming artists and never let success go to his
head.” see also NZ
Listener obituary
(20 March 2004)
Big read
Elizabeth Knox’s Daylight – a typically
imaginative tale involving caving, mysterious deaths, and a Resistance heroine –
makes the Australian’s list of Big Reads for 2004.
(27 December 2003)
Being Beryl Fletcher: the life of a "feminist firebrand."
NZ author, Beryl Fletcher, was a guest
speaker at the Melboune Writers Festival in August. Fletcher's latest work
- The House at Karamu - is a personal memoir, which "attempts to map
the identity shift experienced by a generation of women inspired to reinvent
themselves." Says Fletcher, "With fiction, you're a puppeteer, pulling
strings. But memoir unmasks you."
(29 August 2003)
Little Piece of Ground on a fractious edge
Award-winning NZ-born author, Elizabeth
Laird, has earned the wrath of Jewish pressure groups following the publication
of her latest children's book, A Little Piece of Ground. The story is a
fictional account of a Palestinian boy whose family's olive groves are
confiscated by Israeli settlers, and was written after Laird visited Ramallah as
part of a British Council scheme to encourage children's writing. Laird:
"This is an important story that should be told. It shows a child under
military occupation … There is already a great deal of understanding of Israel
… The voice of the Palestinian child, on the other hand, has not been
heard."
(23 August 2003)
Third Culturist Boyd nets Nabokov
Brian Boyd-edited Nabokov's
Butterflies, an exploration of Nabokov's obsession with butterflies that
posits Nabokov's scientific pursuit of lepidoptry as a way of understanding the
author more completely, hailed as third culture exemplar in Weekend
Australian's 'science reads' review. "Miscellany with a pleasing sense
of mania about it ... one of those rare books that combines great charm and
extraordinary substance, and that transforms our appreciation of the author and
all his work." Author John Fowles in The Spectator found that
"the book quivers with life like a recently caught butterfly itself."
(19 - 20 July 2003)
The Magus and his protégés
"Do creative writing
courses work? Judge for yourselves." The Guardian's literary gossip
column reports on the
findings of a recent NZ Listener poll naming the country's top 10 authors
under 40. Six of them - Catherine Chidgey, Tim Corballis, Kate Duignan, Paula
Morris, Emma Neale, and Emily Perkins - are graduates of Bill Manhire's
productive creative writing programme at Victoria University. Damien Wilkins, Chad Taylor,
Charlotte Grimshaw and Craig Marriner completed the talented ten.
(5 July 2003)
Tremain mines our past
The latest offering from award-winning
British author, Rose Tremain, finds its inspiration in mid-19th century NZ and
thwarted edge expectations: "We will not cling to familiar ways. We will
imagine ourselves reborn over there. On the acres I am buying, everything will
begin afresh." The
Colour - a tale of "bush rats and broken lives" - unfolds amidst
the harsh extremes of heat and cold of the Southern Alps' Kaniere
and Kokatahi goldfields.
(17 May 2003)
Bone people a modern classic
Keri Hulme's the bone people
featured in a Guardian poll of the Top 50 novels by women writers. The NZ Booker Prize winner
sits alongside Alice
Walker's The Color Purple in the list of "old favourites and new
heroines."
(12 May 2003)
"Sex is cheap, but domination isn't"
Former NZ university lecturer and academic, Jody Hanson, interviewed in The
Age on her newfound role as a dominatrix and writer in Melbourne. Known on
the dungeon circuit as Mistress J, Hanson conducts seminars, and has written two
books, on the art of domination. Together with Mistress Margaret, Hanson
recently established The Domina Reform School - "for good girls who'd
rather be bad."
(7 May 2003)
Method writing
Writer Philippa Boyens speaks out on her own epic quest; adapting the Lord of
the Rings trilogy for the screen. With her collaborators Walsh, Jackson
and Sinclair, Boyens battled against political misreadings, weird names and the
slippery slope to geekiness. "It drove us insane, basically," she
says.
(23 March 2003)
Bright spark
Chad Taylor's Electric
continues to receive great press from leading reviewers. Guardian:
"The hypnotic pull of Taylor's story lies in the zigzag dance of its
forlorn characters, casting a murky, uneasy sense of doom. Not one for action
fans, but a book that offers subtle rewards for connoisseurs of entropy
noir."
(25 January 2003)
Literary dairy export
Sarah-Kate Lynch has forsaken
editorship of New Zealand Woman's Weekly in favour of a career in
fiction, with a first novel Blessed Are the Cheesemakers. While Guardian
reviewer Helen Falconer finds the book "somewhat over-processed," film
company Working Title (Bridget Jones' Diary, Four Weddings and a Funeral)
wasted no time in buying the rights to what they see as cheese's answer to Chocolat.
Fondue anyone?
(11 January 2003)
Sunny praise for Chidgey
The Strength of the Sun by Lower Hutt writer Catherine Chidgey
makes LA Times Best Books list for 2002. "An exquisitely written,
curiously tantalizing book that looks something like a mystery story but is
something far more evanescent […] a beautifully crafted, often poignant
work."
(8 December 2002)
Wilkins' latest bonds with reviewer
Guardian reviewer Phil Whitaker assesses Damien Wilkins' novel, Chemistry,
a chronicle of drug addiction and family trauma set in small-town NZ.
"Wilkins is brilliant at character, and his resistance to movement for the
family members is clearly deliberate and quite possibly true to life. [...] the
writing is full of verve. Wilkins has an eye for telling detail, a great ear for
dialogue and a dark sense of humour. It is easy to understand the acclaim he has
already won in his native New Zealand."
(16 November 2002)
Booker Prize: end of an era?
Observer critics liken this year's Man Booker Prize win to that of
NZ's Keri Hulme on "that unforgettable night in the mid-80s." Yann
Martel's The Life of Pi won thanks to "a virtuoso display of
chairmanship" by Lisa Jardine. Hulme's novel, the bone people,
was similarly promoted by then chairman, Norman St John Stevas. Yet, while
Hulme's win belongs to "Booker's glorious past," The Life of Pi is called "reader
friendly and market conscious" - something which has certainly never been said of
Hulme's difficult and experimental work.
(27 October 2002)
From strength to strength
Boston Globe finds the
UV rays result in intense expression in Lower Hutt
writer Catherine Chidgey's latest novel, Strength of the Sun: "a
meticulously constructed novel of true imagination."
(9 June 2002)
Karl Popper's NZEdged legacy
Roger James in the The Guardian
ponders the centenary of the birth of one of the C20th
most original (and controversial) thinkers, philosopher Karl Popper. In an
affirmation of edge theory Popper's most influential work (a pair of
books of which the most famous is The Open Society And Its Enemies) was
written while at Canterbury University College, Christchurch, NZ, where
he spent the whole of the war taking up a lectureship after fleeing Nazi
occupation of his native Vienna (Popper was born to Jewish parents who had
converted to Christianity).
(27 April 2002)
"A work of almost perfect pitch"
CK Stead's new novel The Secret History of Modernism
reviewed inThe Age: "Stead is very clever and he's comfortable on this
ground, patrolling that sometimes misty territory between truth and invention,
between history and fiction, with admirable purpose." The Guardian
has an alternative reader-response to Stead's "infuriating, confusing, yet
ultimately provoking take on the masochism of surrendering to narrative." Link here
for Simon Upton's review of the "splendid literary stoush" between
Professor Stead and reviewer Philip Mead in the correspondence columns of The
Times Literary Supplement.
(1 April 2002)
A Russian soul
Joanna Wood's
"beautifully written" biography of "short story master"
Katherine Mansfield, Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield,
details the New Zealand-born writer's lifelong passion for everything Russian:
"She liked to wear Russian clothes, used Russian versions of her name, was
passionate about Russian music, and her literary love affairs with Leo Tolstoy,
Fyodor Dostovesky and Anton Chekhov strongly influenced her writing". Click
here for Damien Wilkins's excellent NZEDGE hero story on Mansfield.
(15 March 2002)
Nabokov's Butterflies
The Brian Boyd (University of Auckland Professor and the world's leading Nabokov
scholar) edited Nabokov's Butterflies - a collection of Vladimir Nabokov's
writings about butterflies, reviewed by Mark Ridley in The Times Literary Supplement.
(March 2002)
Weldon CBE
New Zealand-raised London-based writer Fay Weldon is now Fay Weldon, CBE.
"One feels very flattered," says Weldon, honoured for her charitable work
as well as her writing.
(30 December 2001)
Madcap Pamela bestselling biographer
New Zealand-born Pamela Stephenson, practicing psychotherapist and ex-comedian (part of the anarchic
foursome who made the
seminal and career launching comedy Not the Nine o'clock News - along with Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones), achieves remarkable success with her
biography of husband Billy Connolly. Sales in Britain and Australia alone reach
840,000.
(6 January 2002)
More than Mansfield in Bloomsbury Group
Liz Calder, the NZedged head of Bloomsbury publishing (publishers of such
literary luminaries as Michael Ondaatje, Will Self and John Irving), talks to The Guardian
about the touted blockbuster battle, book and film drawn as weapons, between
Bloomsbury's Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings: "There's no
link other than the obvious one, that they're both extraordinarily good stories.
What they're so successful at is in taking the reader into another world in a
complete fashion, in such a way that you don't want to come back: you don't want
the books to end".
(4 November 2001)
Author graced with further award
Author Patricia Grace is honoured with the 2001 Kiriyama Pacific Rim book prize
for her novel Dogside Stories. The award was established to promote
cross-cultural understanding.
(October 2001)
Irish
Ties
New
Zealander Bridget Patterson took her Grandmother's diary to Ireland - and the
story is now part of a BBC TV series
Blood Ties.
Archived story
(28 September 2001)
Booker long-list Graced
Kiwi author Patrica Grace's Dogside Story about an East Coast Maori
township makes the long-list for the much-vaunted Booker Prize, shunting
aside Salman to join such luminaries as Beryl Bainbridge, Peter Carey, Ian
McEwan, V.S. Naipaul and Nadine Gordimer in the literary rabbit-chase
round the track. Bets open.
(16 August 2001)
Brits take to New Girl
Emily Perkins's The New Girl: "The atmosphere of summer, youth and
restlessness in a social backwater is strong, as is the projection of Miranda's
intriguing personality and its effect on Julia, her brightest pupil. Perkins's
potential is clearly considerable."
(15 July 2001)
Scholar honoured
New Zealand novelist, poet, critic and scholar Professor Karl Stead awarded an honorary
doctorate by Bristol University.
(20 June 2001)
Memory example
Memory, acclaimed New Zealand author Margaret Mahy's teen-fic book on Alzheimer's,
care, and healing is part of a trend towards more complex depictions of older
people in fiction written for children and young adults.
(26 June 2001)
Edgey Egger
"By the time the article appeared
in mid-February, Dave had decamped from
New York to New Zealand. The international dateline, like the hostile
astrological signs in Romeo and Juliet, meant he didn't see the proof until too
late; just how star-crossed can two buddies be?"
(11 March 2001)
Writer's birthday
The 13 of March is the birthday of novelist, Sir Hugh Walpole, born in
Auckland in 1884.
(13 March 2001)
The authors' luck
The selection of New Zealand novels Baby No-Eyes, The Vintner's Luck
and Believers to the Bright Coast on the short list of six for the new
A$40 000 Tasmanian Pacific Region Prize for best novel "shows the country's
strength of literary creativity" says judge Professor Brian Matthews.
(12 January 2001)
Still sailing
Ian Tew's soon to be published In Grandfather's Wake includes an account of
finding Grandpa Graham's old yacht "in full commission" in New
Zealand.
(26 January 2001)
Land ahoy!
Karne Hesse's teen novel Stowaway chronicles the life of Nick Young,
a stowaway on Cook's ship and the first of the crew to spot Aotearoa
(17 December 2000)
Immaculate Duffy
New Zealander Stella Duffy, creator of
lesbian crime-fighter Saz Martin, tackles God and redemption in her latest Immaculate
Conception: "I think it's ground-breaking to write about miracles as if
they're real. It's not very post-modern of me, but it's very post-millennial".
(16 December 2000)
Fearless storyteller
"At 12 she was carrying a gun as big as she was, fighting for freedom in
the Hungarian Revolution." Later, Anna Porter made it to New Zealand as
a refugee. Now she runs a major Canadian publishing house, writing mystery
stories and an autobiography on the side.
(6 November 2000)
Well done
NZ-bred Fay Weldon needn't have the Rhode Island Blues over reviews
for her latest book: "she writes thoroughly modern fables that throw light
and cast doubt on the meaning and wisdom of contemporary pieties."
(21 September 2000)
Who is that famous writer
living next door?
Michael King spoke
about his authorised and hugely successful biography of Janet Frame at the
Melbourne Writers’ Festival. Frame a recluse: she writes under her
own name, but lives under a pseudonym. Other Kiwi writers at the festival
included CK Stead and Alan Duff.
(5 September 2000)
Framing
the truth
Wrestling with the Angel, Michael King's
bio of Janet
Frame, has generated acclaim, column inches and voluminous sales in New Zealand and overseas. Stephanie Dowrick
describes Frame as "(one of) the two great 20th-century writers in English
from our region, and among the top dozen writers in English from any country".
(25 September 2000)
Stories from the Diaspora
“I write to give voice to
those who are otherwise lost or forgotten completely in Pacific literature:
young girls and women.” Pasifika Press in New Zealand snapped up Sia Figiel’s
where
we once belonged which went on to win the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize.
(July 2000)
Sun, sea, sand and ... guns: Palm Beach Hotel (Gaza)
New Zealand journalist Phil Reeveson, writing for the Independent, visits
the chaotic and 'screwed up' Gaza Strip - the conflicted strip of land between
Egypt and Israel. Including a visit to a Jewish luxury hotel, mini-golf tennis
courts et al, whose aim is not to make profit: "It is an ideological
hotel" the owner explains.
(8 July 2000)
Looking Down: Fleur Adcock reaps poetic insight from the fringe
"Strangers are good for us, they help us see ourselves in unfamiliar ways.
They take slightly different routes across our wearisomely footslogged home
turf." [Adcock's] poetry is acute, intelligent, fastidious,
sceptical, often disturbingly funny. It takes a kind of aerial view of mankind
and his desperate foibles.
(16 May 2000)
The seduction of sand: TimeOut falls for Long, Hot Summer
[Barbara Anderson's] "Long Hot Summer is a joy to read. Someone
stops breathing in the final scene and the reader holds their breath as well.
Like the rest of this cleverly patterned novel, it is unsentimental but moving,
the comic comeuppance keenly anticipated and thoroughly deserved. Anderson
deserves to be cherished too."
(May 2000)
Long Hot Summer puts the heat on readers
Kiwi Barbara Anderson's latest novel gets praise in Times review,
"a fine and sharp intelligence infuses Anderson's characters and dialogue
... Long Hot Summer demands attention from the reader, but it is worth
it".
(20 April 2000)
New Zealand scholar suggests sceptical slant on Sikh story
Kiwi scholar Hew Mcleod puts claims
made in Patwant Singh's The Sikhs to the test of historical veracity - a
task that has made him persona non grata with many members of the world's fifth
largest religion.
(29 April 2000)
Get it right mate - Theroux undone by Stead detective work
"This week the London Review of Books prints a
long investigation by the poet CK Stead into a lunch party at Naipaul's house
attended by Theroux and a New Zealand couple Stead happens to know."
(22 April 2000)
A sting in the tale
"When the New York Times says of your second novel that it
"constructs a sturdy web of silken prose", you might reasonably
conclude that, as a novelist, you have arrived. When into the bargain, that novel
is on the shelf marked Crime/Thriller, you might be entitled to punch the air in
triumph. Frankly it’s hard to imagine New Zealand reared Julie Parsons doing
either".
(15 April 2000)
Nabokov's Pale Fire still smoulders
38 years later, the mystery continues to intrigue... Auckland University's
Professor Brian Boyd attempts to solve the enigma.
(14 March 2000)
Ghost Story
Commentary on a commentary: New York Times Book Review of Auckland
University scholar Brian Boyd's attempt to unravel the riddles embedded in
Vladimir Nabokov's classic story Pale Fire.
(5 March 2000)
"I Love Dick"
Interview with Kiwi writer and avant-garde filmmaker
Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick (the spare-no-prisoners tell-all that
scandalised the Soho Intelligentsia) talks about anorexia, romance, and faking
it.
(3 March 2000)
"Fresh Talent" Chad Taylor sends sophisticated shivers in
Shirker
"With a tight and observant style, Taylor has weaved an engaging tale
reminiscent of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and with
peripheral detail as obsessive as Easton Ellis's American Psycho.
He may touch upon lofty notions of mortality - but it is his cinematic
sense of location and narration that whisks us towards the novel's
inventive finale."
(March 2000)
Grimshaw deals with Guilt
"New Zealand crime writer Charlotte Grimshaw creates simply drawn urban
landscapes, whose noirish, unsettling atmosphere is powerfully caught"
(22 Jan 2000)
"It's ok I'm wearing really big knickers"
NZ-Edged Louise Rennison, author of hilariously funny and best-selling novels
for teens documents such existential provocations as angst ridden days, erupting spots and bickering with parents. Rennison spent her teenage years in
New Zealand and talks to DJ John Peel about the 'night before syndrome' she
experienced while working at a bank in Whakatane.
(2000)
"Hi-ho hi-ho, it's off to work we go
..." Fay Weldon and the new
ergonarchy
New Zealand raised Fay Weldon takes time-out to ponder the future,
"We could have the leisure society if we wanted it. But Samuel Smiles
won; our lives are ruled by a work ethic and a duty to consume".
(17 April 2000)
Christina Conrad: edge poet and outlaw of the tribe
Noted poet Billy Marshall Stoneking writes about New Zealander Christina
Conrad for art journal alicubi, locating the genesis of her expression in
the New Zealand edge: "Conrad studiously disdains mediocrity, fashion and
safety ... artistically, she is the consummate savage. Conrad's poetry is outlaw poetry. It eschews all rules, habits, and
conventions."
(2000)
Female guru
Fay Weldon and why we love those wise big women
Maddening, sexy, inconsistent, irascible,
solipsistic, profound, perplexing and provocative ... and we love her. New Zealand-raised Fay Weldon joins
the female-guru big-time along with Germaine Greer, Betty Friedman and Anita
Roddick.
(8 May 2000)
Film Fatale: Chris Kraus
"Yet by affirming the "weakness" of her under- appreciated spiritual
heroes, Kraus may have found an idiot-proof formula for this book to work
whether it works or not." Village Voice book review of Kraus’s Aliens
and Anorexia ponders the paradox of whether Kraus’s failures are a valid
excuse to succeed.
(19
-
25 April 2000)
"When all at once I saw a crowd"
Fleur Adcock gives poetic
tribute to bard of the Lakes
On the 150th Anniversary of William Wordsworth's death, New Zealand-born poet
Fleur Adcock has been chosen to unveil a plaque amongst the Easter daffodils
(of course) at Dove Cottage where Wordsworth once lived.
(22 April 2000)
One for the connoisseurs: Kiwi crime writer weaves a seductive web of existential
anomie
New Zealand crime-fiction writer Chad Taylor makes a big impact on Guardian
reviewer Maxim Jakubowski, "Shirker: a fascinating and obsessive
novel from New Zealand with shades of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy..."
(25 March 2000)
Barbara Anderson's Long Hot Summer hits the northern hemisphere
"Any fan of sharp, poised social comedy, driven by immaculately droll
prose, should investigate the New Zealand writer Barbara Anderson".
(13 May 2000)
CK Stead explores the dynamic of
the network
Time Out reviews CK Stead's
Talking About O'Dwyer, a "cracking history lesson-cum-psychological
profile" that takes in Oxford Dons, Maori makutu (curse) and the effects of
distance and time: "As is the way even now when New
Zealanders meet, there is often a connection stemming from the past, be it
familial or by association."
(May 2000)
The truth about bed: Fleur Adcock: Poems 1960-2000
"This very welcome collection of her verse confirms her status as
arguably the most distinctive writer to have come out of New Zealand since
Katherine Mansfield.
(20 April 2000)
Pale Fire
re-ignited by Kiwi Nabakov scholar
A commentator from a distant land that begins with Z composes an outlandish
elucidation of another man's masterpiece. "remarkable, obsessive,
delirious, devotional study".
((May 2000)
Basic Instinct gives Alpha Male brilliant bittersweet edge
The Times gives William Brandt's collection of short stories, Alpha
Male, lavish praise: "Surreal and sometimes downright weird,
every tale is strong in its own right - a rare thing in any book of
stories, let alone a debut."
(27 May 2000)
New Zealand writer nominated for
Commonwealth Writer's Prize
Kapka Kassabova, regional winner for best first book in Commonwealth
Writer's Prize to be decided in April.
(March 2000)
Stead and Knox star at Melbourne Writer's Festival
New Zealand writers CK Stead "whose new novel has earned rave
reviews in Britain and the US" and Elizabeth Knox feature among
global talent including Aboriginal leader Pat Dodson, Zadie Smith (White
Teeth), Alain de Botton (How Proust can Change Your Life), and
Sci-Fi guru Arthur C. Clarke.
(4 July 2000)
|
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Catton shortlisted
Wellington author Eleanor
Catton, shortlisted for the 2009 Guardian first book award for her
debut novel The Rehearsal, talks to the newspaper about the book's
beginnings, its inspiration and the "hardest bits". "In my
honours year at university I'd become massively excited about the idea of the
performativity of selfhood, particularly with respect to gender. The
Rehearsal grew outward from these ideas, I think — the characters and the
plot really came second. Teenagers are so wonderfully self-conscious about their
own selfhood, and this hypersensitivity turns everything into a performance of a
kind. In this way the high school setting provided me with a good platform to
explore the ideas I was interested in. Also, the experience of adolescence was
still fairly fresh in my mind — I was 20 when I started writing the
book." The winner of the award will be announced in December. The award
comes with a £10,000 prize plus an advertising package in the Guardian
and the Observer for an author's first book published in 2009.
(28 November 2009)
Solace in the city
Auckland writer Chad Taylor
has received a number of reviews commending his latest novel The
Church of John Coltrane. A sequel to 1994's Heaven — made into
a film by Miramax in 1998 — The Church of John Coltrane returns to the
world Robert Marling, whose father has died and left him a large jazz collection
and a pile of questions. He wanders the streets of Auckland in a funk trying to
find answers. The book has been positively reviewed in several European
publications, including Swiss Le Temps ("boy wonder") and the French
Sud Ouest ("sublime"). Bibliosurf.com compared Taylor with Haruki
Murakami, French author Patrick Modiano and Raymond Chandler. Taylor's 2003
novel Electric is currently being scored as an opera by New Zealand
composer Warwick Blair. The Church of John Coltrane is available through
French publisher, Christian Bourgois.
(16 August 2009)
Stellar young talent
Eleanor Catton, 24, has been praised in the first international reviews for her
novel, The Rehearsal, receiving rave write-ups in influential
publications The
Scotsman, The
Times and The
Daily Telegraph. Tom Adair, writing for The Scotsman favourably
linked Catton's work to that of another renowned debut. "As debuts go, this
one is astral — as well as teasing, intelligent and knowing. It made me think
of Bonjour Tristesse (1955) and of its author, Françoise Sagan, another young
writer of stellar talent." In The Times review of the book, Melissa
Katsoulis said "Timeframes overlap and collide in this ingenious
ontological kaleidoscope of a debut, but the experimentalism — which demands
that the reader keep all her wits about her — is tempered by a real knack for
narrative and a cast of painfully familiar teenage characters who are all
desperate to be as confident, cool, charismatic and funny as possible. These are
qualities that the extraordinary Eleanor Catton has in spades." The
Daily Telegraph reviewer, in an equally enthusiastic review, wrote that
"Catton shows she can address the big themes in life while remaining alert
to small details." Victoria University Press published The Rehearsal last
year and it has been nominated in the fiction and best first book of fiction
categories of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards to be announced on 27 July in
Auckland.
(7 July 2009)
Janet's grace
"To whatever extent the intellectual, emotional, and artistic struggles of
Janet Frame's protagonist [in Towards Another Summer] mirror those of its
author, a wrenching portrait of both emerges, fascinating especially in its
exploration of nostalgia as well as in its cross-genre experimentation with the
novel as memoir," writes Robert Braile in a Boston Globe review.
"Written in 1963, Frame refused to have Towards Another Summer
published in her lifetime, considering it too revealing. The author skillfully
depicts the psychological intricacies of nostalgia, using various narrative
techniques to express the conflict between a desired past and an undesired
present at the heart of this emotion. She is so artful in doing so that it lends
credence to the autobiographical nature of the novel, especially as Frame also
suffered emotional difficulties, also went on a similar weekend trip in the
early 1960s, and also was from New Zealand but lived in London. She even
physically resembled Grace."
(10 June 2009)
Holiday reading
Wellington author and high school teacher Bernard Beckett's novel Genesis
is recommended by American bookseller Roxanne J. Coady on the Women On The Web
site, which also includes an excerpt from the first chapter of the book. Beckett
wrote the young adult novel Genesis while on a Royal Society genetics
research fellowship investigating DNA mutations. It won the young-adult fiction
category of the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults 2007
and the 2007 Esther Glen award. In 2008 the book made publishing history when UK
publisher Quercus Books offered the largest advance ever put forward for a young
adult novel in New Zealand. Beckett teaches at Hutt Valley High School in Lower
Hutt.
(23 May 2009)
Writing from abroad
New Zealand-born, Bryan Gould's latest column for The Guardian Newspaper
identifies governments as the only organisations in a position to take the
necessary long-term approach needed to stimulate the global economy and counter
the recession. "Only governments have the capability and the duty to act in
the wider interest ... and to act consciously to defy market logic by spending
when others can and will not." Gould, who regularly writes for The
Guardian on political and economic issues, was a New Zealand Rhode Scholar
who studied law at Oxford and went on to have a career in the British Labour
Party. He was Vice-Chancellor of Waikato University for ten years and is
currently a director of TVNV.
(30 March 2009)
Commonwealth win
Auckland author Mo Zhi Hong has won Best First Book Prize for South East Asia
and the South Pacific at the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009 in London for his
debut novel The Year of the Shanghai Shark. Shanghai Shark is the
story of a young boy's rite of passage as he enters into the bustling,
cosmopolitan street life of the contemporary Chinese cities of Dalian and
Shanghai, under the tutelage of his uncle, a professional pickpocket. Winners
representing four regional areas go on to compete for the overall Best Book and
Best First Book awards, which will be held this year at Auckland's Aotea Centre
on May 16 as part of Auckland Readers & Writers Festival.
(11 March 2009)
Gray's marvellous mutants
New Zealand comic book writer and editor of the Marvel Collectors' Edition line
of magazines Scott Gray is interviewed by Comic Book Resources about
"his take on the second generation of X-Men, the villains he'll be pulling
in and the fan favorite artist who joins him on the series, 'Uncanny X-Men:
First Class', which is out in June. Gray says he grew up in New Zealand in the
1970s "when absolutely every Marvel title was available." Gray told CBR:
"I've been living in England since the early '90s, working in the comics
industry in a number of guises I wrote the 'Doctor Who' comic strip for eight or
nine years, and have edited a line of Marvel reprint titles for Panini Comics
UK. I even got to resurrect 'The Mighty World of Marvel!' Writing an X-Men comic
is literally a childhood dream come true for me. EVERYTHING about this is
exciting — heck, I can't wait to see the staples!" Gray has also worked
with fellow New Zealander and London-based comic book writer Roger Langridge to
produce 'Fin Fang Four'.
(28 February 2009)
Perchance for professor
Auckland-born poet Fleur Adcock is one of eight names being discussed by the
Oxford University English faculty to take up the position of professor of poetry
when current incumbent Christopher Ricks comes to the end of his five-year
tenure in May. The holder of the post, seen as the most important in poetry
behind that of poet laureate, is voted for by Oxford graduates and comes with a
small salary of £6,901. Adcock, who lives in Britain, has published 13 books of
poetry. She received the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 2006, and in 2008 was
awarded Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature.
Chair of Oxford's English faculty board Dr Sally Mapstone said she hoped that
graduates would want to elect a professor "who sees poetry as culturally
central to modern society as well as one who values its traditions and
history".
(22 January 2009)
Evolution of the artist
Dennis Dutton, philosophy of art professor at The University of Canterbury, has
published a book building off his standard-bearing art theory website Arts &
Letters Daily. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution is
a look into evolution's role in the artistic process. Dutton contends that
humans are drawn towards the creative as a means of displaying a societal
fitness, differentiating the artist via skill and individuality. Namely, as
Damian Da Costa points out in his review of the book, "style in art evolved
as a means of distinguishing the exceptional individual from a crowd of
suitors." According to Dutton, it is these motivations that provide the
scaffolding for our artistic impulses and appreciations, and these motivations
that render forgeries invaluable, as they imply no evolutionary positional good.
Mr. Dutton is currently on a book tour in America, promoting the work.
(15 January 2009)
Raskolnikov reincarnate
New Zealand author Neil Cross discusses his latest novel The Burial in UK
publication Metro. "I've always been fascinated by guilt," says
the 39-year-old, who divides his time between producing fiction and writing for
TV drama Spooks. "But I was also interested in the fact that around 80 per
cent of murders are committed by someone who is drunk. What must it be like to
wake up and remember you are a murderer? The thought makes me feel sick."
Cross excels at uneasy landscapes, be they urban, rural or psychological: from Natural
History to the Booker-nominated Always the Sun, everyday settings are
so subtly infected with menace it takes a while to locate just what is making
the narrative so frightening. Burial is pure story, with virtually every word
geared to conveying the emotionally isolated essence of a life circumscribed by
near-intolerable guilt. Cross' first novel, Mr In-Between, was published
in 1989.
(7 January 2009)
In search of a history
New Zealand film producer and public speaker Anna Wilding is now writing regularly
for the TennisGrandStand site, and in her first column, as the US Open
approaches, she writes about her great uncle, tennis legend Captain Anthony Wilding and
the "hallowed grounds" of Forest Hills, New York. "My 'Uncle
Tony' actually played his last match in America at Forest Hills, before being
killed in the war in 1915 at the tender age of 32. In that time, he also won
bronze at the Olympics," Wilding explains. "In The New York Times
in 1915, W. De B. Whyte wrote the following: 'In tennis [Anthony Wilding] was
always the soul of honour; as courteous and gallant a player as ever set foot in
an American court. He was the last man ever to excuse himself for poor form or
indifferent play.'"
(19 August 2008)
Underwear wanderings
Christchurch travel writer and columnist Joe Bennett's quest to find the origins
of his five-pack of Chinese-manufactured underpants, took him to a remote
western corner of China and the cotton fields of Xinjiang. Bennett's odyssey,
entitled Where Underpants Come From, unravels the mysterious workings of
global capitalism. Bennett's trip enabled him to better understand the modern
consumer. "They are rich, silly and grasping, very much in the manner of
donkeys chasing the unachievable carrot," he says. "You don't buy
happiness in a department store. But the illusion is an illusion of crucial
importance to a Western capitalist society." Bennett's columns are
syndicated in newspapers throughout New Zealand.
(8 July 2008)
London from home
New Zealand author Emily Perkins leans out to close a window at her publisher's
in Soho and "raising her voice over a building site, takes a deep breath of
London air to say, 'It's great to be back'." Perkins spent 11 years in
London writing about New Zealand. It wasn't until three years ago, after moving
back home to Auckland, that she properly started work on her first London novel,
About My Wife. This is also Perkins's first novel about pregnancy and
parenthood, written from the perspective of a man. It was another form of
distance that she found liberating, she says. "After 10 years I feel I know
London now. To be able to write about it from New Zealand is great because I'm
really able to inhabit this imaginary London." Perkins teaches creative
writing at Auckland University and presents The Book Show on Television New
Zealand's TV One.
(16 May 2008)
Laureate discovers
Wellington poet Bill Manhire is profiled in The Age as a man who quite
accidentally fell upon letters, who secretly wrote at school until he read Walt
Whitman in his final year at school. Manhire is in Australia this week at the
Adelaide Readers' and Writers' Week. New Zealand's first poet laureate and
director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria
University, Wellington, Manhire says he will just sit down and scribble words
for several pages. "Suddenly you just bump into this very strange phrase
that you couldn't have anticipated and that is charged with all sorts of
resonance, so you chase on after what that phrase suggests and suddenly you are
in the territory of what you don't know; that unmapped space," he
says.
(23 February 2008)
Ongoing impact
A Dutch academic has published a book examining the impact Once
Were Warriors has had on NZ culture. Once Were Warriors The
Aftermath: The Controversy of Once Were Warriors in Aotearoa New Zealand is
written by University of Amsterdam media studies lecturer Emiel Martens. In it,
Martens discusses the widespread controversy created by both Alan Duff's book
and Lee Tamahori's film in relation to wider postcolonial issues such as racial
stereotypes, cultural politics, ethnic relations, indigenous media and Maori
identity. Said Martens in Wellington's Dominion Post, "I regard [Once
Were Warriors] as a very important movie, well, actually the most important
movie in the history of New Zealand cinema, and, together with the novel, the
most important cultural expression in New Zealand ever, because of this
impact."
(22 October 2007)
Fashion writer swaps stilettos for saddles
Well-known NZ fashion reporter Stacy
Gregg has turned her hand to writing children's fiction. Gregg, a keen horse
rider as a young woman, noticed a gap in the market for well written pony
stories for the 8 to 12 age group. "There were a couple of modern [pony
centric] series that I found truly awful," she said in a NZ Herald
interview. "The writers seemed to know nothing about horses and they didn't
have any genuine passion for them. And I found the only really good horse books
for girls like me were written way back in the '50s. So I knew there was room in
the genre." Harper Collins UK has already published the first two books in
Gregg's 8-book Pony Club Secrets series, which was launched in the Commonwealth
market this month. Gregg has also sold the German rights to the series and is
fielding calls regarding film rights. Her first two books - Mystic
and the Midnight Ride and Blaze and the Dark Rider - are
currently numbers 12 and 15 on the children's top 30 books chart at WHSmith, a
prominent UK bookseller chain.
(6 October 2007)
"Imaginative daring" wins literary gong
New Zealander Kirsty Gunn has won the Sundial Scottish Arts
Council Book of the Year award, one of Scotland's most esteemed literary prizes.
Gunn, a professor of creative writing at Dundee University, received the honour
for her acclaimed novella The Boy And The Sea. She was presented with a cheque
for £25,000 by Sundial Properties managing director William Gray Muir at the
Edinburgh International Book Festival. "I am delighted that the award has
gone to Kirsty Gunn," he said. "The Boy And The Sea is a truly
remarkable book, with its poignant story drifting effortlessly between poetry
and prose." A spokesman for the judging panel described Gunn's book as
"a novella of consummate subtlety, imaginative daring and emotional
intensity". Kirsty Gunn is a graduate of the Victoria University of
Wellington.
(18 August 2007)
Backstage essential
NZ-born osteopath to the stars Garry
Trainer has released a new book, Back Chat, with health writer Tania
Alexander. Back Chat examines 40 individual case studies of back pain,
identifying common causes and offering advice on how best to avoid them.
Regarded as a pioneer in his field, Trainer has worked in the UK for the past 25
years and runs a successful clinic in London's Primrose Hill. His clients, past
and present, include Brad Pitt, Paul and Linda McCartney, George Michael, Emma
Thompson and Paul Simon. Despite his star clientele, Trainer remains grounded by
his patients' common physiology. "It doesn't matter if you're black, white
or green, how rich you are or how poor you are. We have all got the same muscles
and nerves and the same discs. Anyone that moves is prone to back pain", he
said in a recent interview with NZ's Sunday Star Times. Trainer's next
high-profile job is working on the film version of ABBA musical Mama Mia,
starring Pierce Brosnan and Meryl Streep.
(10 June 2007)
Pub weirdo finds his voice
South London-based NZ writer Paul
Ewen has released his first book, London
Pub Reviews. Ewen set up his own publishing company, Shoes With Rockets, to
make sure the collection of humorous fictional reviews of real pubs made it to
the shelves. It is now being sold at the Tate Britain and numerous independent
book shops around the city, as well as on Amazon. "I first got to know my
way around London by using a pub guide and by visiting the best pubs in
different areas," says Ewen. "Because I was using it so much, I sort
of got into the vernacular of the pub guide, and when I started writing in these
pubs I was visiting, the pub reviews became a kind of scaffolding for my
stories." According to fellow author Tom McCarthy, Ewen has "given
voice to that perennial figure who haunts the margins of all our lives: the pub
weirdo", while author and editor Toby Litt hails Ewen as "the funniest
new writer I have read in years".
(23 May 2007)
Short and sweet
Auckland writer Charlotte
Grimshaw has been nominated for the world's richest prize for collected
short stories, the £35,000 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
Grimshaw joins 32 authors on the Irish event's longlist, including heavyweights
Alice Munro and David Malouf. She describes Opportunity, her first ever
collection, as "not just a collection of short stories that I've thrown
together - all the stories are interconnected. The characters recur and reappear
and it has an extra layer in a way because one of the characters is the author
of all the stories." Grimshaw, 40, won last year's Katherine Mansfield
Award for short fiction and is the author of three acclaimed novels:
Provocation, Guilt and Foreign City. The Frank O'Connor shortlist will be
announced in July, and the winner declared at Cork's Frank O'Connor
International Short Story Festival in September.
(30 April 2007)
Piano plagiarism causes aesthetic dilemma
Denis Dutton, Canterbury University professor and founding editor of Arts
& Letters Daily, writes about a "scandal unparalleled in the annals
of classical music" for the New York Times. Dutton's piece explores the
implications for instrumental criticism caused by the recently-outed piano
plagiarist, Joyce Hatto. Hatto was widely acclaimed for her late-life recordings
before it was revealed that she had been passing off the work of upcoming
pianists as her own. "I'm personally convinced that there is an authentic,
objective maturity that I can hear in the later recordings of Rubinstein,"
writes Dutton. "This special quality of his is actually in the music, and
is not just subjectively derived from seeing the wrinkles in the old man's face.
But the Joyce Hatto episode shows that our expectations, our knowledge of a back
story, can subtly, or perhaps even crudely, affect our aesthetic response."
Dutton's piece was re-published on leading thinkers' website, the Edge
Foundation.
(20 March 2007)
Cash versus creativity
Auckland-raised author Fay Weldon mourns the death of literary creativity in a
passionate column for The Times. "Time was when popularity was the mark of
artistic failure," she complains, "These days it's the other way
round. 'Bestseller' betokens artistic success ... A 'good' book is, by
inference, an easy book. A 'good' book is one that sells." Weldon blames
the dominance of marketing over editorial departments, the rise of the sequel
and prequel, and the rumoured control large bookselling chains have over
publishing houses for what she terms the "tyranny of the bestsellers."
A version of the same article also appeared in the Royal Society of Literature
Review.
(10 February 2007)
Linda Niccol notches British Screenplay Prize
Wellington writer Linda Niccol has won the prestigious British
Short Screenplay Prize ahead of 2000+ other screenwriters. Her script for
The Handkerchief was judged best script by a panel that included Kenneth
Branagh, Alan Parker and Nik Powell. As part of the prize, The Handkerchief will
be made into a 15-minute film in 07, with a budget of up to US$300K. Linda
Niccol’s 2005 collection of stories The Geometry of Desire was described by NZ
Listener as “fearless…rueful, razory humour… dialogue that’s edgy,
injurious, points-scoring…Niccol takes risks with style, allusion and
structure.” Film runs deep on Rosetta Rd as brother and director Andrew is the
writer of Lord of War, Nicole, Gattaca and the seminal Truman Show.
(15 December 2006)
Million dollar baby
An entrepreneurial NZ website is selling words for SUS1 each in a bid to create
a one-of-a-kind multi-authored novel. The brains behind anovelmillion.com
is Australian born Aditya Kesarcodi-Watson. "Anybody is capable of buying
words for the website, and they will be credited as an author," he
explains. "People choose their words and email them to me, and I upload
them to my website." Users can either contribute to the million word novel
or a shorter million character story.
(6 July 2006)
A place in the sun
Granta editor, Ian Jack, writes about Katherine Mansfield's convalescence in
Menton for the Guardian. Menton, a resort town on the French Riviera, was
renowned for its curative sea air in the early 20th century. Suffering from
tuberculosis, Mansfield stayed at the Villa Isola Bella from 1919 to 1921, dying
shortly afterwards in Switzerland aged 34. Menton has a street named in the NZ
writer's honour - Rue Katherine Mansfield - and the Villa Isola Bella is home to
two bronze plaques commemorating its famous former resident. Writes Jack,
"[Mansfield] wrote some of the greatest short stories of the last century:
Bliss, The Garden Party, The Man Without a Temperament. To have written just one
of them, I thought on the platform at Menton Garavan: that would be
something."
(10 June 2006)
Itinerant observer
Groundbreaking NZ anthropologist, Michael Jackson, currently Visiting Professor
in World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, has released his memoirs. Titled The
Accidental Anthropologist, the book details his nomadic lifestyle since
leaving NZ as a young man, particularly his time spent with the Kuranko people
of Sierra Leone and the Aboriginal tribes of Australia. "I simply want
people to see for themselves that the life of every Sierra Leonean is as
complicated, as peculiar, as purposeful and as rich as the lives of New
Zealanders and North Americans," he says in an interview with the NZ
Listener. "And you can only do that by having recourse to a lot of
particulars that can't be assimilated into some kind of generalisation about
culture or society or community or history - these big categorical boxes we dump
everything into." As well as numerous anthropological and academic works,
Jackson is the author of two novels and six volumes of poetry. He was awarded an
honorary doctorate in literature by Victoria University of Wellington in June
this year.
(1 July 2006)
Grimm scholar's big find
Renowned NZ Germanist, Professor Alan Kirkness, who retired from Auckland
University in 2004, played a key role in the discovery of nine new books by
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. The hand-annotated
volumes of the German dictionary, begun but never completed by the Brothers
Grimm, have been missing since WW2. Kirkness and his German colleague Berthold
Friemel have been writing letters and emails to Eastern European libraries since
the 1970s. The works finally turned up in Cracow, Poland, where Kirkness has
long expected to find them. "It's not an earth-shattering discovery,"
he says in the NZ Listener. "But in Grimm research it would have to be the
most significant find in half a century or more. It is more unknown material
that has come directly from the pen of these two leading German
intellectuals."
(13 May 2006)
New take on an extraordinary figure
Sir
Edmund Hillary: An Extraordinary Life, a new authorized biography by art
curator Alexa Johnston, has been well received both at home and abroad.
According to Johnston, speaking in the Sunday Star Times, the book grew out of
an exhibition celebrating Hillary's life which she curated in 2003. "I
wanted [the book] to have a strong visual component, encapsulating much of what
had been shown at the museum … There are other books about Ed, of course,
including his own, but I think I've come up with a fresh approach." The
Baltimore Sun recommends the book as essential winter reading: "Sir
Edmund's life has been more than just conquering the world's highest
mountain."
(24 November 2005)
Tribute to a torchbearer
Chicago-based writer, Cheryl Kent, has published a book on internationally
renowned Wellington born architect David Hovey entitled The Nature of Dwellings: The
Architecture of David Hovey. Amazon’s editorial notes describe Hovey as “the
torchbearer for modern residential design … Hovey picks up where Frank Lloyd
Wright left off, forging ahead with explorations of simple materials,
rectilinear geometries, and structural innovation all in the service of
free-flowing floor plans that merge indoor and outdoor into a cohesive whole.”
(September 2005)
From strength to strength
Catherine Chidgey’s second novel, The
Strength of the Sun, is rapturously received in the New York Times.
“It's difficult to articulate exactly what gives this novel its unassuming power
… In combination, the disparate elements of Chidgey's novel create a dense and
multifaceted whole, an arresting portrait of a world where the past never
disappears entirely, but keeps returning to us - however imperfectly - in
countless small and unexpected ways.”
(19 June 2005)
Writer in residence
Wellington-based British
author Neil Cross, has made the 2004 Man Booker Prize long-list with his fourth
novel, "Always the Sun". The story tells of a father’s attempts to prevent his son
from being bullied. In an interview with
Pulp.Net, Cross
identifies Wellington’s Unity Books as his favourite bookshop in the world,
calling it “small and supernaturally well-stocked.”
(26 August 2004)
Anderson wins reviewer's heart
Barbara Anderson's latest novel,
Change of Heart, warmly reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement:
"With the authority of experience Anderson captures perfectly the foibles,
prejudices, anxieties and joys of the kind of septuagenarian who announces, 'We
can keep cruises for when we're old' ... Anderson's greatest skill, however, is
the creation of quirky characters ... these are not stereotypes but people whose
words and actions are rooted in their personalities and backgrounds."
(11 June 2004)
Giant kauri tragically felled
NZ mourns the loss of its preeminent cultural historian, Michael King. The
author of 34 books - including the groundbreaking autobiographical work Being
Pakeha and acclaimed biographies of Dame Whina Cooper, Hone Tuwhare, and
Janet Frame - King was honoured last year as a "giant kauri" of NZ literature at
the inaugural Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement, and named New
Zealander of the Year by the New Zealand Herald. His Penguin
History of New Zealand has sold a staggering 70,000 copies since its
publication last October, highlighting the great esteem in which he is held by
everyday New Zealanders as a chronicler of their times. King was killed
instantly in a car crash on March 30 - along with his wife Maria Jungowska -
just weeks after announcing his full recovery from throat cancer.
(31 March 2004)
From sea to sky
Witi Ihimaera – “debonair 59-year-old,
multi-award winning author, playwright, librettist, anthologist, university
lecturer, former foreign diplomat and Maori activist” – interviewed in the
Age about his latest novel, Sky Dancer. Following on the successful
formula of Whale Rider, the book weaves Maori myth into a modern-day
tale, with a spirited young girl as its heroine. The story – first scrawled in
pencil on his bedroom wall as a twelve-year-old – tells of an epic battle
between the birds of land and sea. A film version of Sky Dancer is
already in the works.
(8 January 2004)
Epilogue written to a life of words
NZ lost one of its edgiest inhabitants with the death of Janet Frame from
acute myeloid leukemia on January 29. Frame, the author of 11 novels, 5 collections
of short stories, a poetry collection, and an acclaimed 3-part autobiography,
was NZ's leading contender for a Nobel Prize for literature, twice nominated.
She was regarded as the country's
greatest living author, if not of all time. The world's press has expressed
sorrow at Frame's passing, with tributes in the
Times,
Scotsman,
New York Times,
New Zealand Herald,
Hindustan Times, International Herald
Tribune and
Guardian, and obituaries by compatriots Michael King in the
Sydney
Morning Herald and
Guardian, and CK Stead and Fleur Adcock in the
Independent. Fellow author
Witi Ihimaera likened Frame's death to losing a beloved grandmother: "She
had been so much a part of all our lives. She's been an icon." "Janet
Frame has made an extraordinary contribution to both New Zealand and the world's
literary canon," said Creative New Zealand head,
Elizabeth Kerr. "Reading Janet Frame's novels and poetry is to take a
journey into what it means to be human. Her death is a sad loss for writers and
readers throughout the world, and for New Zealanders."
(2003)
Edge of the alphabet conjurer has cancer
SMH pays tribute to
Janet Frame - "one of New Zealand's most celebrated and enigmatic writers" - who
recently revealed she is terminally ill with cancer. Frame's biographer Michael
King (Wrestling with the Angel) was quoted in the article: "There
will be Janet the writer observing it all and being interested in it until the
last possible moment ... If you maintain that interest, it pushes the demons
into the background." He likened Frame's stature in NZ to that of Sir Edmund
Hillary: "The country will feel the same kind of bereavement when we no longer
have them."
(2003)
Salty tales for stay-at-homes
Voyaging the Pacific, Miles Horden’s account of sailing between his
native NZ and Patagonia, reviewed in Japan’s Daily Yomiuri. “Miles
Horden's book … is a cracking good yarn, mainly because he is such a solid
writer; modest, knowledgeable and subtle without making a big thing out of those
qualities - in contrast to, say, Bruce Chatwin. There is a huge amount of
interesting stuff compressed within these pages, about South Pacific and South
American culture, about maritime etiquette and lore, and most of all about the
moods of the sea and the effect they have on the solitary sailor … This is a
book to be savoured slowly, and only if you don't mind being made to feel a
boring and unadventurous stay-at-home.”
(19 October 2003)
Slow burner
Annamarie Jagose’s Slow Water – the tale of a gradual unravelling of
English class systems and sexual identities on a voyage to colonial NZ - praised in the SMH.
“The book has a wide emotional range. It is also written in unpragmatically
ornate prose. At times, Jagose's prose is exacting; at other times, delightful.
But it's a slow trip. Jagose wants to communicate a lot more than the facts of
the matter. And that takes time.”
(7 June 2003)
People together: NZ re-imagined
CBC critic, Eleanor Watchel, travelled
through NZ to interview some of NZ's literary animals in their natural
habitats. The Writers & Company radio special celebrated a literary
landscape that included
authors Patricia Grace, Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Knox, Gregory O'Brien, Witi
Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, Alan Duff and Albert Wendt. "New Zealand’s writers
embrace their unique heritage in original work that reflects the modern
complexities of life in the South Pacific."
(11 May - 1 June 2003)
New Romantics
Young urban women in NZ and Australia
are the target market for a recently re-vamped Mills & Boon series.
Publisher Harlequin hopes to snare Sex & The City fans rather than those of
Barbara Cartland. Social commentator Sandy Burgham, has her doubts: "There
has been this whole explosion of 'chick lit,' but the difference between that
and Mills and Boon is that chick lit is about the chick, not 'I'm in love with a
sexy man.'"
(14 May 2003)
The Book of Fame (and fortune) for Lloyd Jones
Lloyd Jones' The Book of Fame has won the $40,000 biennial Tasmania
Pacific Fiction Prize, Australia's most lucrative literary award. The Book of
Fame is a poetic national myth-making account of the 1905 All
Black tour of Europe. "It’s an important award because it presents
fantastic opportunities to cross-pollinate our literature with that of our
neighbouring countries.” Purchase The
Book of Fame in the NZEdge shop. The theatrical adaptation
by Carl Dixon opens at
Wellington's Downstage Theatre on 9th May and film rights to the story have been optioned.
(30 March 2003)
Taylor electrifies critics
NZ writer Chad Taylor impresses international critics with his new noir novel, Electric.
Pulp: "Dark, intense, fast-paced, and perceptive, both noir literary
thriller and pulp crime fiction […] Cool, surreal and sexy - make it the first
book you read in 2003." GQ: "Hums with energy […] an
inventive and intelligent thriller." Observer:
"The plot seems to unfold in another world where reality is shifting and
elusive. Taylor's impressively laconic prose style is enough to maintain the
tension of the narrative right up to the end."
(January 2003)
Giving voice to the past
Lynda Chanwai-Earle’s challenging
one-woman play about growing up Chinese in NZ – Ka Shue (‘Letters Home’)
– earned her a major write-up in Hawaii’s Star Bulletin. Described as a “fascinating
look at a relatively unknown chapter in the history of overseas Chinese … much
of it of it taken from the experiences of her great-grandmother and down through
the female lineage to herself,” Ka Shue deals with “poll tax
descendents,” mixed-marriages, and cultural collision. In 1994 Chanwai-Earle
wrote an acclaimed collection of poetry entitled Honeypants, drawn from
her experiences with NZ gang culture. She was then invited to take creative
writing courses in women’s prisons throughout the country, as well as work with
male and youth offenders.
(23 January 2003)
Good clean ball
"Small but perfectly
formed." Lloyd Jones' The Book of Fame included in SMH's
tribute to the short novel, or novella. Jones joins the likes of Michael
Ondaatje and Jeanette Winterson as one who achieves that "sustained burst
of genius, an outburst of passion, a gift, a one-off in a writer's career."
(28 December 2002)
Moving biography as an art form
Nola Farman reviews Roger Horrocks' Len Lye biography for Art Monthly
Australia, calling it "the revelation of yet another brilliant and
creative New Zealand moment." The biography is Horrocks' tribute to an
artist he feels has been unjustly overlooked, a man who remains "an
exemplar of energy and integrity for fellow artists." Farman is as full of
praise for the biographer as she is for the revolutionary work of Lye himself:
"The book is written with integrity by a researcher who minimizes his voice
so that Lye's love of life, his speed and the pattern of his associative
thoughts are revealed."
(October 2002)
Reforging public perceptions
James Belich's history of C20th NZ, Paradise Reforged, applauded in lengthy TLS article.
Reviewer Jane Samson: "It is refreshing to have a personal vision of
the country's history from an astounding scholar who writes with lucidity and
wit. Speaking of 'islands of difference' rather than a unified people, Belich is
at his best when dealing with the implications of diversity for [NZ's] national
identity."
(6 September 2002)
Making myths
Lower-Hutt author Lloyd Jones gives the Aussies something heavier than Pavlova to think about:
"Now and then someone will write a book in the smaller country that demands
the bigger country sit up and pay attention […] in this starkly beautiful book
[The Book of Fame -
about the 1905 All Black's tour of Britain] he tackles the origin of myth,
the creation and nature of man-made beauty, and the sense of self New Zealanders
have both as individuals and as a nation.
(10 June 2002)
Where is New Zealand again?
Doing
the Billie's Kiss PR, Elizabeth
Knox pauses and reflects on the exotic settings for her books with a wry comment on
her cultural identity:"I know I'm a New Zealand writer, but I'm not writing about
New Zealand, and that in itself is very New Zealand. We just have this culture
that tells you who you are before you've grown into yourself, and that's kind of
repulsive for artists. So some of us run away, physically or mentally.'' Place that on
the New Zealand literary map.
(June 2002)
Stephenson wins UK Book of the Year
Award
Not the Nine O Clock News comedian turned psychotherapist turned
biographer, NZ-Edged Pamela Stephenson wins the book of the year prize at the
British Book Awards for her "frank and often harrowing" account of
husband Billy Connolly's life. Shrugging off Lit heavyweights Ian McEwan, Beryl Bainbridge and Jonathan
Franzen in the process . "The award doesn't, of course, just belong to the author, it very
much belongs to the subject especially if you want
to stay married to him."
(6 March 2002)
From NZ with love
"Spunky New Zealander" Mary Hobbs, editor of NZ
Outside, and her mountain guide husband Charlie, use their own money to put
together a book from their fellow countrymen to New Yorkers rocked by
the events of Sept 11. Entitled Letters to New York and America from New
Zealand with Love, the book "builds on human spirit and tries to bring
the world a little closer together". Homage from the fringe.
(13 February 2002)
"for you to see
our world the right
way round."
Allen Curnow,
one of New Zealand's great 20th-century writers and poets, has died in
Auckland. Daily
Telegraph: "regarded by many as New Zealand's greatest poet"
Curnow helped define a separate NZ identity in verse, "deeply
committed to the landscapes
and cultures of his home." Sydney
Morning Herald: "He made us see as if for the first time".
You Will Know When You Get There: A door/ slams, a heavy wave, a door, the
sea-floor shudders./ Down you go alone, so late, into the surge-black
fissure.
(28 September 2001)
More Margaret Mahy Magic
The multi-award-winning author, who was first published and praised in
the United States over 30 years ago, has had her books translated into
15 languages. She has won literary prizes in the UK, Italy and the Netherlands.
And now she has won New Zealand's premier award for children's literature for the sixth time - for
her new book 24 Hours.
Archived story
(30 September 2001)
The Fox Boy
Comment on Peter Walker's "fascinating"
biography of William Fox Omahuru, the Maori boy abducted to be raised by Sir William
Fox, future New Zealand PM. A tale of colonialism told with "doggedness,
intelligence and humour," described by the Guardian Review as: "Densely
packed, vivid and moving," Daily Telegraph: "original,
engrossing" and "superior
kiosk book"
(July 2001)
Blighted Bloomsbury
A Savage from the Colonies, "an ingenious three-hander" at the
South Africa's National Festival of the Arts dramatises
Katherine Mansfield's last hours. "Tugged between her Chummie, the gormless
New Zealand brother killed in the trenches, and an interrogating older woman
daemon, she proved deeply engrossing."
(13 July 2001)
Underground S&M
Q&A with Emily Perkins, including her worst fear - "it's a tie
between black-water rafting and those SM zip masks. So I guess being on a
black-water raft with everyone wearing those masks would be it".
(28 July 2001)
Emily's choice
British-based New Zealand writer Emily Perkins sat on the all-powerful all-grrl jury for the Orange Prize, Britain's major literary award for women
only. Also, Perkins comments on the double jury battle of the sexes
controversy in Salon.
(June 2001)
Get it right
In the unsettled paradise that is the Pacific, accuracy and local knowledge are
a reporter's only hope says seasoned island-hand, New Zealand journalist David
Robie.
(21 May 2001)
Double life
UK Poet Charles Boyle's The Age of Cardboard and String features "a
poet who leads a double life in England and New Zealand".
(11 March 2001)
Cyber-verse
Cultural export poet Andrew Johnston pushes poetry on the web.
(19 February 2001)
Mahy magic
Margaret Mahy's 24 Hours, her latest teen novel released in America,
is "compelling and emotionally satisfying".
(26 November 2000)
Sia in America
Samoan New Zealander Sia Figiel reads from her second book, They Who Do
Not Grieve (US edition forthcoming). Figiel won the Commonwealth Writers'
Best First Book Prize for Where
We Once Belonged.
(5 October 2000)
Golden
Deeds
Catherine Chidgey, novelist and editor, won the Pacific Commonwealth Best
First Book award for In a Fishbone Church. Golden Deeds, her
second novel has been published by Picador, leading publishers
of contemporary fiction world-wide.
(5 October 2000)
Art and text:
In an ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Artist Corp) collaboration
Kiwi writer Damien Wilkins offers a "rather beautiful piece of writing"
to accompany an exhibition of paintings by ascendent Aussie painter Noel McKenna
(the exhibition was inspired by Southland, New Zealand). The Sydney Morning
Herald gushes that Wilkins' work is "worth reading, as the exhibition
is worth catching."
(14 August 2000)
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Angelic sequel
Wellington author Elizabeth Knox's latest — a sequel to her 1998 prize-winner The
Vintner's Luck entitled The Angel's Cut — has been "published
to strong praise" writes the Courier Mail's Kathleen Noonan. The
Vintner's Luck, which was published in seven countries, won numerous prizes
and was long-listed for the 1999 Orange Prize. Knox's success has come from
anchoring her audacious imagination in earthly reality; she bowerbirds things
from the everyday. In The Angel's Cut, young smart Flora is burnt
horribly at a fancy-dress party when her boyfriend mischievously touches a
cigarette to the grass skirt she is wearing. "That happened here in New
Zealand," Knox says. Now she is writing a science fiction horror book, set
in a small town near Nelson in contemporary New Zealand. Then she has a young
adult fiction to complete, before turning her attention in 2011 to the final in
her Xas trilogy, The Angel's Reserve. "I know it's taking a long
time but the living I do in between each book, and lessons I learn, I apply to
Xas in learning how to be human. And there's been a lot of learning this
year." Niki Caro's film adaption of The Vintner's Luck is currently
in cinemas.
(30 November 2009)
Rewire and succeed
Browns Bay neuroscientist Dr Kerry Spackman, 53, has written a book called The
Winner's Bible which instructs how to rise beyond your natural limits using
detailed examples of people Spackman has worked with over the past decade.
"This book grew out of need," Spackman says. "The motor racing
champions, Olympic athletes and top level business people I coach had all tried
psychologists, psychotherapists and read hundreds of self-help books without any
real benefit. What they desperately needed was something that actually worked in
the heat of competition and in their daily lives. Something that not only helped
them become better performers, but more importantly helped them to become better
people and to enjoy their life more." Spackman has been hired to help the
All Blacks leading up to the 2011 Rugby World Cup. He is a consultant
neuroscientist to four leading Formula One teams and has won major awards in
fields as diverse as Electronic Engineering and Applied Mathematics.
(2 September 2009)
Limelight shy
Wellington author Eleanor Catton, 23, who is based in Iowa studying at the
prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, says in an interview with the Irish Times
that she is enjoying travelling the world promoting her first novel, The
Rehearsal — although she didn't initially feel totally comfortable
performing in the media spotlight. "It's still kind of surreal, to be
honest. I feel like I'm at a dress-up party and someone's about to tell me I've
come in the wrong costume." Catton says that New Zealand authors can feel
like outsiders in the international literary scene. "It's quite funny being
a writer in New Zealand," she says. "The literary scene is really
vibrant and really happening over there, but there's always a sense that you're
off stage somehow because you're so geographically removed from the rest of the
world. You always get the sense that things are happening elsewhere."
Catton is hard at work on her next novel, set during the 1860s gold rush on the
west coast of New Zealand's South Island. It will, she says, have a slightly
fantastical element — she was a huge fan of fantasy writers such as Susan
Cooper growing up. And she thinks writing this book will be a very different
experience to the creation of her debut. Catton was born in Canada in 1985 and
raised in Christchurch. She received the Adam Award in Creative Writing in 2007
for The Rehearsal and won the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition
in New Zealand.
(18 July 2009)
Accolades for Catton
Wellington author of The Rehearsal (Victoria University Press, NZ and
Granta, UK) Eleanor Catton, 23, has won the UK's Betty Trask Award worth
£8,000. Sebastian Faulks presented £60,500 in prize money to twenty-one
writers on Thursday, 18th June at a reception held by the UK Society of Authors
in London. The Betty Trask Prize and Award started in 1983 from a bequest to the
Society of Authors to fund a prize for first novels written by authors under the
age of 35 in a traditional or romantic, but not experimental, style. The prize
money must be used for foreign travel. The Rehearsal tells the story of a
high-school sex scandal and its myriad consequences, and has been hailed by
critics and readers alike since its release last year. It has also been
nominated in the fiction and best first book of fiction categories of the
Montana New Zealand Book Awards to be announced on 27 July in Auckland. Catton
signed contracts with two prestigious international publishers last year, with
her UK publisher Granta about to release their edition of The Rehearsal in July.
She is also due to appear at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and at a
number of literary festivals in North America.
(29 June 2009)
Needing fiction like water
Brian Boyd, a distinguished professor of English at the University of Auckland,
defends fiction in his new book On the Origin of Stories, which offers an
overview and defense of Darwinian literary criticism, though Boyd prefers the
term "evocriticism". Why do human beings spend so much time telling
each other invented stories, untruths that everybody involved knows to be
untrue? The ability to use stories to communicate accurate information about the
real world has some obvious usefulness in this department, but what possible
need could be served by made-up yarns about impossible things like talking
animals and flying carpets? Boyd's explanation, heavily ballasted with citations
from studies and treatises on neuroscience, cognitive theory and evolutionary
biology, boils down to two general points. First, fiction — like all art — is a
form of play, the enjoyable means by which we practice and hone certain
abilities likely to come in handy in more serious situations. Second, when we
create and share stories with each other, we build and reinforce the cooperative
bonds within groups of people (families, tribes, towns, nations), making those
groups more cohesive and in time allowing human beings to lord it over the rest
of creation. In the second half of the book, Boyd applies his idea of
"evocriticism" to two exemplary works: the Odyssey and Dr
Seuss' Horton Hears a Who.
(18 May 2009)
Advocating radical change
A "ground-breaking" report has been developed by the United Kingdom's Sustainable
Development Commission (SDC), an expert watchdog group chaired by Jonathan
Porritt, the son of New Zealand Olympian and 11th Governor General Arthur
Porritt. Entitled 'Prosperity without Growth?', the report strongly critiques
the relentless pursuit of economic growth and demands "a radical shift to a
fairer, more sustainable society", offering a 12 step plan to make this
transition. The SDC is the leading advisory group on sustainable development to
the Westminster and Holyrood governments, providing counsel to British Prime
Minister Gordon Brown and Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond. Porritt has
chaired this group since July 2000 and is a renowned writer, broadcaster and
commentator on sustainable development issues.
(29 March 2009)
Writings of here and there
Author Kapka Kassabova moved to New Zealand from Bulgaria in 1992 at the age of
17 "having suffered the full experience of 'Socialism with a Human Face'
that was the notional premise behind the Bulgarian government: a family of four
living in two rooms in a modern yet decaying block, in a street with, as
Kassabova says, no name." In her latest book, Street Without a Name,
which is reviewed in the Guardian, she reports of a trip back to Bulgaria
after living in New Zealand and Scotland, where she now resides. "It is a
beautifully structured book: its closing pages take you back to the beginning,
by which time you will know and feel for Bulgaria much more deeply than you did
when you started. The country, you will learn, seems to have turned up
remarkable women regularly during its history; it strikes me that, in her quiet
way, Kapka Kassabova, 36, could be one of them." Kassabova's first novel Reconnaissance
(1999) was short-listed for the fiction section of the 1999 Montana New Zealand
Book Awards, and won the Best First Book award in the South East Asia and South
Pacific section of the 2000 Commonwealth Writers Prize.
(14 February 2009)
Into the bazaar
New Zealand Herald columnist and travel writer Jill Worrall is interviewed by
Iranian freelance journalist Kourosh Ziabari for The Moderate Voice, a
widely-read independent political news blog, on the topic: 'Iran — the most
misunderstood country'. Including a central discussion on whether the news media
stereotypes, Worrall recalls a trip she took to Iran in November 2008 as a tour
group leader of 29 New Zealanders and about their pre-conceptions of the
country. "Even among the well informed members of the party and the well
travelled," Worrall explains, "there was so much surprise as they
travelled the country and realised just how different it was to what they'd been
led to believe." Worrall has co-written several books with her husband,
including Landscapes of New Zealand and Coastlines of New Zealand.
She intends to write a book on her observations of Iran.
(19 January 2009)
Better off before
New Zealand historian David Thomson was one of the first people to write about
the "phenomenon" of the "lucky generation" born during the
period from the late 1920s through the 1930s according to The Sydney Morning
Herald. Happiness and contentment are never guaranteed, of course, but in
Australia the statistics suggest you had a better chance of achieving them if
you were born in the decade before World War II than at any other time in the
past century. In Thomson's 1991 book Selfish Generations he writes:
"The rules which cause income to flow between age groups are being altered
constantly, to the persisting advantage of those born in some years." He
noted with a tinge of bitterness that in terms of government policy the result
was: "To be born in the 1920s and 1930s is to be protected; the later one
is born, the more expendable one becomes." Thomson was concerned that the
future of the welfare state might be at risk, because its favouring of one
generation would eventually lead to resentment from subsequent ones.
(27 December 2008)
With grand applause
Wellington-based author Eleanor Catton's first novel The Rehearsal has
been bought by US publisher Granta for a six-figure sum. Currently working on
her MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop as a 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship
recipient, Canadian-born Catton, who is 23, completed an MA in Creative Writing
at Victoria University in 2007 and won the Sunday Star-Times short-story
competition for Necropolis that same year. The Rehearsal is set in a
girl's school during the aftermath of a sex scandal, and in a drama college
where the students take the scandal as the subject of their end of year show.
Granta editorial director Sara Holloway described Catton's writing as
"breathtakingly clever and inventive and assured". In an interview
with the Sunday
Star-Times Catton said of the hype surrounding her work: "I might,
in five years' time, think, what did I do? I hope I can trust that the book is
going to represent what I want it to represent in 10 years' time." In New
Zealand The Rehearsal is published by Victoria University Press.
(19 November 2008)
Travel award for editor
Taumarunui travel writer and publishing editor of Inside Tourism Nigel
Coventry has been named the 2008 Pasific Asia Travel Association Travel
Journalist of the Year. PATA president Peter de Jong said Coventry had been a
bastion of professional journalism for more than 30 years. "IT has
grown to become a primary source of tourism-related editorial for stakeholders
in New Zealand's travel and tourism industry and continues to break new ground
with its independent analytical approach to industry news," said de Jong.
Coventry said he was delighted to receive the award. "I was totally
flabbergasted as I live in a very small town in a very small country at the
bottom of the world - and someone noticed my work," he said. Coventry
founded Inside Tourism in 1994.
(2 August 2008)
Piercing revelation
Janet Frame's 1963 novel, Towards Another Summer, written in London and
first published posthumously in New Zealand in 2007, is considered by Guardian
reviewer Rachel Cooke. Towards Another Summer is based on a weekend visit
Frame made to the north, to the home of a journalist, his New Zealand wife and
their children (the journalist was Geoffrey Moorhouse of the Guardian,
who interviewed Frame in 1962). "As an account of what it is like to be an
overly sensitive and lonely single young woman, it is as true and as piercing as
anything I have read in a very long time," writes Cooke. "Strongly
reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, the novel is exciting for
its language. It feels surprisingly right to hold Towards Another Summer.
It is a short novel, but a numinous one. This time, the keepers of the flame did
the right thing."
(29 June 2008)
Hatched on a poultry farm
Author Joy Cowley's novel Chicken Feathers is reviewed this month in The
Boston Globe, her storytelling described as "effortless mastery".
Sweden had Astrid Lindgren, and France its Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Each great
writer possesses the genius of his or her own place, and Joy Cowley can lay fair
claim to New Zealand's literary landscape. Cowley grew up around animals, and
continues to write beautifully, affectionately, and accurately about them in Chicken
Feathers, paying fond homage to her fine feathered friends, especially in
the weird and eccentric heroine, Semolina, a talking, slightly alcoholic hen.
Cowley has written over 600 books. She lives in the Marlborough Sounds.
(15 June 2008)
Colonial space rockets
First published in New Zealand in 1881, the second volume of science fiction
novella The Great Romance lay hidden on the shelves of Dunedin's Hocken
Library until the 1990s when the work was discovered. Published under the
pseudonym 'The Inhabitant', The Great Romance is a hybrid of utopian and
space exploration narratives that reaches out to grasp the reader's hand,
unexpectedly and vigorously, from the equally remote milieu of late 19th century
New Zealand. The novella follows John Hope as he travels into outer space,
landing on a satellite of Venus where he meets the native humanoids, or
"Venuses". It is has been suggested the meeting with the Venuses is a
science-fiction translation of the "more enigmatic and unique attitudes
expressed by Pakeha settlers toward the Maori people of New Zealand."
(18 May 2008)
Marsh remembered
Christchurch-born writer Dame Ngaio Marsh has been named one of the Daily
Telegraph's 50 favourite crime writers, with Vintage Murder (1937)
recommended. Marsh is described as "a New Zealander who created a
quintessentially English detective, the dishy Roderick Alleyn, who featured in
32 sparkling novels. Female fans' hearts were broken when Alleyn eventually
married." She features alongside crime greats, Agatha Christie, Wilkie
Collins, Ruth Rendell and Arthur Conan Doyle. Marsh died in Christchurch in
1982.
(23 February 2008)
Campion on Frame
Jane Campion writes about her encounters with creative compatriot Janet Frame in
The Guardian this month. The NZ-born filmmaker brought Frame's life story to an
international audience with her acclaimed film An Angel at my Table (1990),
after approaching Frame for the rights to her autobiography as a 28-year-old
film student in 1982. Campion describes Frame's autobiography as "one of
the most moving books I have ever read ... the best book ever written by a New
Zealander" and Frame herself as "not, as I sometimes thought, lonely,
but [one who] lived in a rare state of freedom, removed from the demands and
conventions of a husband, children and a narrow social world". An Angel at
my Table won a slew of awards for Campion, including the Venice Film Festival's
Grand Special Jury Prize and the Toronto Film Festival's International Critics'
Award. Janet Frame died of acute myeloid leukaemia in 2004, aged 79.
(19 January 2008)
Close but no Booker
Wellington author Lloyd Jones
has missed out on the Man Booker prize, despite his novel Mister Pip
being the bookies' favourite to win. The award went to Irish author Anne Enright
for The Gathering. "I'm a little bit disappointed but I'm not
crushed," said Jones
after the announcement. Making the shortlist for the prestigious award has had a
profound effect on sales of Mister Pip around the world. Prior to the
short-listing, the book had been sold into 14 countries; it has now been sold
into 27. According to Jones's publisher, Penguin Books NZ, Mister Pip is
by far the biggest selling novel in New Zealand for some time. "While
missing out on the Booker is disappointing, making it to the shortlist was a
fantastic achievement in itself," said Creative NZ chief executive Stephen
Wainwright in the NZ
Herald. "Lloyd keeps producing fresh and original writing. He
hasn't been afraid to take risks and it is great that he is now receiving
international recognition for his work."
(16 October 2007)
Posthumous gem
The Janet Frame Literary Trust has posthumously published a novella written by
the great NZ author in 1963. Dismissed by Frame as "embarrassingly
personal", Towards Another Summer is about a homesick NZ writer who
is working on a long and difficult novel while living in London. "Imagine
writing so often and so well that your personal slush pile includes a novel like
this!" writes academic Rachel Buchanan in the Melbourne Age.
"Readers who want to match more of Summer's fiction with Frame
facts, can consult [Michael] King's encyclopedic biography but such research is
not essential to enjoy this book." Janet Frame died in 2004 aged 79. Read
her NZ Edge Heroes biography here.
(22 October 2007)
NZ academic unlocks 17th century secrets
Research by a NZ academic launched a 40-year code-breaking endeavour that has
resulted in the publication of an important 17th century English diary. Robin
Gwynn, formerly an associate professor of history at Massey University, came
across Roger Morrice's Entring
Book as a doctoral student in London in the 1960s. At that stage, the
vast diary was relatively unknown and had never been edited. It was written by a
political insider and journalist between 1677 and 1691. "It was a decade of
fear, a most unpleasant time. I'm glad I didn't live through it," said
Gwynn of the period, which included the death of Charles II and the 1688
revolution. Gwynn's code-cracking (much of the diary was written in obscure
shorthand) and painstaking translation, with the help of professors at Cambridge
and Brown universities, led to its six-book publication in July this year.
(4 August 2007)
No ordinary life
A new book about London literary marriages features NZ author Katherine
Mansfield and her second husband, John Middleton Murry. Uncommon
Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles
(1910-1939) by US author Katie Roiphe examines the relationships of such noted
figures as H.G Wells, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Lady Ottoline Morrell. Of
Mansfield and Murry's tempestuous union, Roiphe writes, "fantasy is what
they were both most proficient at - ordinary life they found harder".
(15 July 2007)
Making poetry out of darkness
A profile of novelist, poet and critic CK Stead focuses on both his historical
prominence in the NZ literary scene and his remarkable late-life burst of
creativity. Last year, Stead (74) published his eleventh novel - My
Name Was Judas - to widespread critical acclaim. James Wood, senior editor
at the New Republic and Harvard professor of literary criticism, praised
"Stead's deft marshalling of the language, the way he gets words to do his
bidding throughout without ever being obvious or showing off." Stead's
latest release is a collection of poetry titled The Black River. Guardian
reviewer Nicholas Wroe commends its "clever wordplay," particularly
that found in the "odd and disturbing" poem S-T-R-O-K-E, which Stead
wrote while bedridden and "in the dark" after suffering a minor
stroke. Finally, Stead has edited and provided commentary for the collected
correspondence between himself and his fellow NZ writers Frank Sargeson and
Allen Curnow. All three projects have been undertaken with the help of the
Creative New Zealand Michael King Writers' Fellowship.
(12 March 2007)
South Pacific literati
Five NZ writers are finalists for this year's Commonwealth Writers'
Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards. Ocean Roads by James
George, Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones and The Fainter by Damien Wilkins (pictured) have been
nominated for Best Book in the South East Asia and South Pacific section, while
Davey Darling by Paul Shannon and The Fish & Chip Song by Carl Nixon have
been short-listed
for Best First Book. The regional winners will be announced in March and the
overall winner in May. The Commonwealth Writers' Prize was established by the
Commonwealth Foundation in 1987, with the aim of giving authors an audience and
recognition outside of their country of origin. Previous winners include Janet
Frame, David Malouf, Rohinton Mistry, Zadie Smith, Murray Bail, Peter Carey and
JM Coetzee.
(9 February 2007)
Itinerant observer
Groundbreaking NZ anthropologist, Michael Jackson, currently Visiting Professor
in World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, has released his memoirs. Titled The
Accidental Anthropologist, the book details his nomadic lifestyle since
leaving NZ as a young man, particularly his time spent with the Kuranko people
of Sierra Leone and the Aboriginal tribes of Australia. "I simply want
people to see for themselves that the life of every Sierra Leonean is as
complicated, as peculiar, as purposeful and as rich as the lives of New
Zealanders and North Americans," he says in an interview with the NZ
Listener. "And you can only do that by having recourse to a lot of
particulars that can't be assimilated into some kind of generalisation about
culture or society or community or history - these big categorical boxes we dump
everything into." As well as numerous anthropological and academic works,
Jackson is the author of two novels and six volumes of poetry. He was awarded an
honorary doctorate in literature by Victoria University of Wellington in June
this year.
(1 July 2006)
An outside view
The latest book by acclaimed British author, Jenny Diski - On Trying to Keep
Still - opens with her visit to NZ in 2004 for the NZ International Arts
Festival's Writers and Readers Week. Less a travel memoir than a series of
personal reflections while on the road, the book follows a diverse itinerary
from NZ to Somerset to Lapland. In an interview with the NZ Herald's Sunday
magazine, Diski speaks about her controversial account of Maori haka in the
book. "I don't think it was a criticism, I think it was simply a discussion
of how it appeared to me. The haka is an act of aggression, no question about
it. Historically it is about war, and it's a funny way to greet people."
Despite her reservations about the welcoming wagon, Diski describes her time in
NZ as "one of the great trips of my life."
(6 May 2006)
History to be re-written in Waikato?
University of Waikato researchers have been set about dating an ancient Chinese
map, which could challenge existing beliefs about who first discovered New
Zealand, Australia and America. The theory that Chinese explorer Zheng
He mapped America before the arrival of Christopher Columbus was first
brought to public attention in 2003 with the best-selling book 1421,
but has been debated in academic circles for about 10 years. If the map is
proved to be genuine it would also support claims that the Chinese discovered
New Zealand and Australia in the 15th century. Waikato University houses one of
the world's leading radio carbon-dating laboratories.
(17 January 2006)
Out in the open
An interview with mystery author Anne Perry in the Times inevitably brings up
her former life in NZ as Juliet Hulme, one half of the murderous teenage duo
portrayed in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures. A hugely prolific and
successful writer, particularly in the US, Perry's identity was made known in
the early 1990s. In order to protect her elderly mother from the ensuing media
circus, Perry has deliberately maintained a low profile in her adopted Scotland.
Only after her mother's death in 2004 has Perry opened up in the UK, embarking
on numerous press tours of the region. "I would not have an old lady of 90
having people on the doorstep, telephoning her, pointing long lenses into the
bedroom," she says. "If she was still alive we would not be having
this conversation. I would like to establish a proper literary reputation in
this country, but not at that price."
(12 March 2006)
South sea saga
Pamela Stephenson, NZ born psychologist, author and wife to comedian Billy
Connolly, has published a book retracing the 19th century travels of Fanny and
Robert Louis Stevenson. The Advertiser: "[Written] loosely as the diary of
two women, [Pamela Stephenson: Treasure Islands] is both historically erudite
and delightfully bright and entertaining. Stephenson has a light touch with the
pen and a good eye for her world." According to an interview with the NZ
Herald, Stephenson decided to spend her life savings on a boat after being
visited by the ghost of Fanny Stevenson in an Auckland hotel room. "This
vision poked at her with an umbrella and declared that Stephenson was 'truly
awash' with this 'existential angst, creative illness, mid-life crisis ... you
must take action!'"
(26 November 2005)
Flying the southern flag for philosophy
Victoria University’s Professor Kim
Sterelny has won the 2004 Lakatos Award for his book Thought in a Hostile
World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. The ₤10,000 prize, named in honour
of Karl Popper protégé Imre Lakatos, recognises a book which makes a major
contribution to the Philosophy of Science. Sterelny is the first
southern-hemisphere philosopher to win the prestigious British-based award.
Thought in a Hostile World contrasts the evolutionary development of humans
and chimps, which was very similar until an unknown factor (or more likely
factors) caused the dramatic split evidenced today. “The intellectual centre of
gravity may be in the US, but winning this award proves you can make a
difference as an academic while living in Australasia,” said Sterelny in the
Dominion Post.
(August 2005)
Underbelly exposure
One of the co-authors of controversial U.N tell-all Emergency Sex and Other
Desperate Measures: A True Story From Hell on Earth is NZ-born doctor Andrew
Thompson. Described on
Amazon as a “scorching, devastatingly honest memoir … a first-of-its-kind
confession of love, friendship, and betrayal of ideals from civilians who
volunteered to be on the front lines,” the book landed all three U.N employees
in hot water. Thompson was fired by the U.N after the book’s publication but has
recently been reinstated after he made a successful appeal claiming
whistleblower status.
(25 March 2005)
Handled with care
Mansfield, C.K Stead’s fictional
account of the life of Katherine Mansfield, received warmly in the
Independent. “Any novelisation of this kind is a daunting task, with readers
either knowing too much, or too little. But NZ critic and novelist Stead brings
great delicacy of touch to a cast that includes John Middleton Murray, Bertrand
Russell and the Bloomsbury ‘tangi.’”
(7 January 2005)
Ric Burch stages his story
Ric Birch, the NZ born maestro behind
many of the sporting and cultural worlds’ most spectacular events, has published
a tell-all autobiography entitled Master of the Ceremonies. Birch has
organised the opening and closing ceremonies for the 1982 Commonwealth Games in
Brisbane, the Los Angeles, Barcelona and Sydney Olympics, and the Australian
Bicentennial celebrations and 1988 Brisbane Expo, to name but a few. Publishers
Allen & Unwin describe the book as “a fascinating insider's tale of the highs
and lows of creating truly unforgettable public spectaculars - a gossipy and
fascinatingly entertaining memoir from an author consistently in the public
eye.”
(18 November 2004)
Warner devours Cannibal Dog
Marina Warner recommends Anne Salmond’s The Trial of the Cannibal Dog:
Captain Cook in the South Seas as essential holiday reading in the
Guardian’s annual summer poll of leading authors, journalists, and critics.
“The historian Anne Salmond writes with passion and a sense of human drama rare
in the politically sensitive field of empire [Cannibal Dog] is her
latest: a magnum opus, it combines stirring adventures on the high seas with
eye-opening, original historiography.”
(19 June 2004)
Long and winding road
The Statesman talks to nomadic NZ writer, Will Marks, about his
ongoing love affair with India while reviewing his debut novel, The Highway.
“I didn’t have a lot of expectations of India but when I finally landed up here
in 1998 it affected me in a stronger way than the 40 countries that I visited
ever did.” The Highway is praised as “a lucid otherworldly trip on the
undulating road to nirvana and self-discovery across the Indian subcontinent.”
(21 June 2004)
Perkins on Gee
Regular Guardian contributor,
Emily Perkins, gives a glowing review of compatriot Maurice Gee’s latest novel,
The Scornful Moon. Perkins describes the tale of a struggling detective
fiction writer working during the political upheaval of 1930s NZ as “a
terrifically entertaining fiction of villainy and betrayal, wry social history
and deft political analysis.”
(24 January 2004)
Salt of the edge
In wake of the latest Booker Prize
controversy – in which winner, DBC Pierre, announced his prize money would be
used to pay off $200,000 in drug debts – the New York Times looks back on
other disruptions to the award’s “late-night black-tie somnolence”: “In 1994 the
Scottish writer James Kelman delivered a rousing denunciation of English
imperialism. In 1985 Keri Hulme, home in New Zealand and informed by satellite
phone that she had unexpectedly won for The Bone People, exclaimed, her
voice amplified across the banquet hall, ‘Aw, bloody hell!’”
(16 October 2003)
Armchair kayaking
Chris Duff won the history/biography
section of Britain's National Outdoor Book Awards with Southern Exposure:
A Solo Sea Kayaking Journey Around New Zealand's South Island.
(29 November 2003)
In the frame … again
Janet Frame was again shortlisted
for the Nobel Prize for Literature for a second time, despite
making the Swedish Academy’s top five finalists and being
picked to win by one of the country’s chief literary critics - Asa Bechmann,
of Swedish daily Dagen Nyheter. The prestigious $2.18 million award went
to two time Booker Prize winner, J.M Coetzee of South Africa. Frame previously
made the Nobel short-list in 1998.
(1 October 2003)
Clarke serves up a winner
Kiwi comedian and trans-Tasman icon,
John Clarke, talks about his latest book, The Tournament. Clarke admits
that his satirical account of a tennis tournament played by artistic and
academic legends of the 20th century is perhaps "too elitist and
quirky" to sell well outside his established Australasian fan-base. Still,
he says, "it is really rewarding if people like it, if anyone laughs, or
gets it, or is engaged by those kinds of ideas. It's a wonderful fairground ride
for me."
(17 August 2003)
Sydney set in stone
Wellington-born Sydney Goodsir Smith
is to join the ranks of Scottish poets immortalised in stone outside Edinburgh's
Writer's Museum. The Makars' Court attraction is the Scottish equivalent of
Westminster Abbey's Poets Corner, and features such luminaries as Sir Walter
Scott, Robert Burns, and Sorley MacLean. Goodsir Smith composed all his works in
traditional Scots, despite his Antipodean origins.
(24 July 2003)
Spoken word
The old and new schools of NZ literature were represented at May's Sydney
Writers Festival, with eminent man of letters CK
Stead and fresh talent Chad
Taylor both in attendance. The two joined an impressive international
line-up including Jonathan Franzen, David Malouf and Janet Turner Hospital.
(19
-25 May 2003)
"The Nick Cave of New Zealand literature"
Chad Taylor's growing international reputation continues to buzz, this time in The
Australian. In Electric drug-addled number
crunchers negotiate the power cuts of Auckland's sweltering summer of 1998,
"This is a rare and refreshing book. Taylor composes a tricky, teasing plot
out of the blackness, revealing a gloomy city where sexy ice queens reveal
spines tattooed with tiny equations … Electric plugs itself into Auckland and hums away like the
powerlines should be doing, and it makes the city very cool [...] maybe the
Auckland tourist authorities should sign him up now they've lost their big draw,
the America's Cup. this Auckland is much more fun, even without the boats."
(19
20
April 2003)
Intellectual Grand Slam
John Clarke - the NZ
comedian who "rates as a national institution" across the Tasman -
delights critics with his latest book, The Tournament. A blistering
satire, The Tournament involves a fictitious tennis contest between the
leading lights of the modernist movement - such "cultural titans" as
Duchamp, Eliot, Joyce and de Beauvoir. Clarke sees satire as the last bastion of
democracy: "The world is full of ideas, full of interesting ways of looking
at things. It's all an antidote to being lied to."
(14 December 2002)
Freudian felines
NZ-based author/psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson attempts to unravel
the feline psyche in The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats: A Journey into the
Feline Heart. The "witty, elusive and often enchanting" book
challenges the place of dogs as man's best friends with memorable scenes such as
the author and two cats "jogging blissfully along the beach." Masson,
a former Sanskrit scholar and Freudian analyst at Toronto University, now
resides in New Zealand with his wife and family (and cats).
(20 October 2002)
Steady hand
A thematic juggling act handled with skill: C.K Stead's The Secret History
of Modernism intersperses a tale of young love with one family's
experience of the Holocaust. Washington Post Reviewer Chris Lehman:
"In the hands of a lesser writer, the stylistic unity [of the two
stories] might readily give offense, subtly downgrading one of the 20th
century's most gruesome episodes to the level of romantic bathos [... However]
Stead's unadorned style, attentive to small yet telling descriptive
flourishes, admirably conveys both the broad upheavals of history and the
smaller discombobulations of spirit that make up [the protagonist's]
tale."
(7 August 2002)
The Commonwealth cool club
Emily Perkins muses on OE, clinging to Mummy Britannia's apron strings, and what
being in the Commonwealth meant for her as a young New Zealander: "Being a
member of the Commonwealth always seemed, to be honest, a bit like being in Enid
Blyton's Secret Seven, when the really big kids were in the Famous Five."
But, "Better to be in the Secret Seven than in no club at all."
(19 July 2002)
Legacy of letters
LA Times special focuses on Katherine Mansfield's Wellington.
"Considered one of the 20th century's finest short story writers" -
and the only one to make Virginia Woolf jealous - Mansfield has remained
physically and spiritually intertwined with Wellington via landmarks she
inhabited or immortalized in words. The article contains a list of what to do
and see in Mansfield's hometown which includes visiting her birthplace on
Tinakori Road and taking the ferry to Eastbourne - the setting of what is
arguably her most beloved and quintessentially NZ story, At the Bay.
(21 April 2002)
Life and Loves ...
NZEdged author Fay Weldon traverses a contradictory, but never dull life, in her
autobiography Auto de Fay and finds her muse in the edge: "Always!
Yes, always! I wanted to see more, it was part of being alive. If you're in New
Zealand, you feel that the real world is just around the corner - or a long way
round the corner. You're so far away, you want to know everything."
Reviewed in The
Guardian: "She has always been anarchically clever, funny, fearless, a
one-woman-show." and hilariously interviewed in The
Independent. Famous for 24 novels including Life and Loves of a She Devil
and coining the ad copy "go to work on an egg" and one that didn't
make it: "vodka makes you drunker
quicker." (Above, Fay pictured on the front
cover in a portrait by Rita Angus).
(09 May 2002)
Writer's block
"The literary traffic across the Tasman isn't as brisk as it should be.
Much good writing has to come from Auckland or Wellington to Australia by way of
publication in London; and New Zealand writers are not so well-known here as
they deserve to be. For that reason it is welcome news that Elizabeth Knox and
Elspeth Sandys will be guests at the Sydney Writer's Festival next month."
Rave reviews for both:
"inventiveness runs wild," and The Washington Post is seduced
by Knox's latest, Billie's Kiss.
(20 April 2002)
Shadow play
The allure of the artistic life, "the journey towards the light" is the
central concern of Maurice Gee's "thoughtful" new novel Ellie and
the Shadow Man, reviewed by Nicola Walker.
(9 March 2002)
East to the Edge
A book exploring the distinctly Japanese art of Kabuki has been
"beautifully translated into English" by New Zealander Kirsten McIvor.
Kabuki Today throws open the door to the mysterious world of the ancient
theatrical art form, welcoming the reader into its inner realm and introducing
the actors who bring the form to life.
(February 2002)
The
Fox Boy
The 19th-century studio portrait of a young Maori boy aged five or six,
dignified but standing taut and uncommunicative, captured the imagination
of New Zealand writer Peter Walker, The result was The Fox Boy - a
"beautifully
written and evocative book is a rich and diverse tapestry of New Zealand
colonial life."
(24 September 2001)
Time-out: critics
Knox-ed over
Elizabeth Knox's career and upcoming bovine noir tale gets talked up and
produces another fine vintage according to the passing feet of Time:
"Measured by the beat of
an angel's wing, his [Vintner's
Luck protagonist Sobran Jodeau] otherwise
ordinary life becomes as precious as his vin de cru - and something worth
savoring. Like Knox's unfurling career."
(16 August 2001)
"Erotic, hyper-imaginative fiction"
Elizabeth Knox's Black Oxen is "lush, dark and puzzling," as well as
"startling and strangely satisfying".
Pdf Copy
(31 July 2001)
Thought for Today
"I do believe one ought to face facts. If you don't they get behind
you and may become terrors, nightmares, giants, horrors. As long as one faces
them one is top dog.'' - Katherine
Mansfield, New Zealander author
(1888-1923).
Pdf Copy
(8 June 2001)
Life full of words
Alison Waley, Hokitika-born poet, artist and writer died aged 100. Most famous
for her marriage to Arthur Waley, Waley also had "strength of purpose and
character, and a way with words, written and spoken, that matched his".
(23 May 2001)
Vintage reporter
Eric Young: kiwi journalist with one eye on the game, one on his glass.
Pdf Copy
(26 May 2001)
Memoirs from the Edge
NZ-edged novelist Fay Weldon sits down to write her memoirs - "All they do
is make you self-centered," she says.
(8 April 2001)
Knox them out
The Vintner's Luck takes the Tasmanian Pacific Region Prize,
Australasia's richest literary prize. "There's all this stuff in Vintner
about anxiety and authenticity that's very New Zealand," says author
Elizabeth Knox, noting that, like New Zealand director Andrew Niccol she
deals with "stories of a place that's so beautiful you have to get out of
it".
(6 April 2001)
More Knox
"Very
different and very daring" - Auckland University Professor Albert
Wendt. "For a New Zealander to win an Australian prize seems absolutely
incredible," says Knox. "The only time we can ever get
anywhere in Australia is usually by pounding over the top of people wearing
spurs on our feet."
(April 2001)
Edgey writing gets richer
Las Vegas casino-king and edge-devotee Glenn Schaeffer has established what
will be New Zealand's richest literary prize, a biennial award of $60 000 to a
new writer of literary merit. Schaeffer
wants to bring writing from "one of the most literary nations
in the world" into America.
(11 April 2001)
Novel tourism
Ngaio Marsh is among the few
mystery writers whose houses merit preservation as "literary shrines".
(25 March 2001)
Domestic goddess
Christmas brings out the "Nigella domestic goddess" in New Zealand
lesbian-crime writer Stella Duffy.
(23 December 2000)
Motor Masala
hot fave
Peter Riordan is in contention for the Asia-Pacific Travel writers' prize. His book,
Motorcycle Masala is the story of a journey around India on-you
guessed it-a motorcycle. The award will be announced at the Brisbane Writers'
Festival later this month.
(11 October 2000)
Multiple murders
Anne Perry, formerly Juliet Hulme of
the Parker/Hulme case, tours her latest novel Slaves of Obsession in the
States. Perry has authored over thirty best-selling murder mysteries.
(8 October 2000)
Building Rome and other literary Pastimes
"I like computer games - of the world domination kind." She-Devil/New
Zealand reared novelist Fay Weldon, in the Independent's 50-best list,
admits she has a soft-spot for empire building, channelling her desires
through computer game Caesar III. "I dream of it sometimes ... I like the
computer screen. I like the sense of levels beneath levels, mimicking the
brain."
(July 2000)
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Talking to the trees
New Zealand business and IT consultant and author Claire Bulman, 41, has
released her first book, aimed at children aged seven to ten, The Answer Tree.
Maldon-based Bulman is hoping her target audience will have fun reading the
modern morality tale, enjoying the story about ten-year-old Henry who discovers
a magical, talking tree. She said a walk along a canal near the British town's
Paper Mill Lock got her creative juices flowing. "I was just sitting out in
the sun and I saw my tree. I could see all the faces in it and the story came to
life," she said. Bulman was one of the first female riflemen in the western
world. She also stood for Parliament in New Zealand.
(17 October 2009)
Amidst the peach trees
"My favourite destination in the world will always be Coromandel in New
Zealand," says British author Fay Weldon in an interview with the Telegraph.
"There I can go back to my golden age and find very little changed: it is
as magical and mysterious a place as ever. I was conceived in New Zealand, born
in England, and then spent my first 14 years in the South Island with my mother
and sister before we moved permanently back to Britain. But my sister and I
spent those early golden summers in Coromandel, where my father was the medical
superintendent. During the school holidays we ran free, barefoot among the peach
and apple trees." Though "it's still a good few hours' drive from
Auckland today, the fact that it takes quite a long time to get there is partly
what's kept it so nice."
(5 October 2009)
Such deep silence to hear
Christchurch poet Ursula Bethell's 'Rock Crystal' was a recent Guardian
'Poem of the Week'. 'Rock Crystal', travels beyond the garden and celebrates
wider nature. It's a "holiday poem" but one that takes a metaphysical
turn, and invites us into the process by which a refreshing new vista expands
into the visionary. Bethell is one of the seminal figures in 20th-century New
Zealand poetry. She was born in Surrey, England, in 1874. When she was two, her
parents returned with her to New Zealand, and she spent most of her childhood
there. Bethell is a highly original artist. Yet in her work and life are several
elements that may remind us of Elizabeth Bishop: the dream-house shared with a
woman lover, the keen delight in daily things, the sense of life-long
displacement. Bethell died in 1945.
(7 September 2009)
Karaoke star is born
New Zealand Herald travel writer Jim Eagles describes a Korean karaoke as
"dangerously addictive". Eagles recently visited Jeju City on a
business trip. When his work was done, his Korean host invited him as well as
some other foreigners, to a "Singing Room." Conscious of his
ineptitude for singing, Eagles strongly yet peacefully resisted. But his host
insisted. "You must try karaoke," she said. "It is part of our
culture. It is what we do when we go out. If you want to understand Korea, you
have to try this." Gradually things did liven up. And he also got to sing.
"I took the mike, stared at the screen and started, 'In the town where I
was born ...' It wasn't great but I didn't think it was too awful either. Then
the karaoke machine gave my score: 97, the highest of the night so far. Cue
applause. I was a star."
(1 August 2009)
Tongue-twisters charm
New Zealand children's author Margaret Mahy has won a best picture book
award for Bubble Trouble at the 2009 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards for
excellence in children's and young adult literature announced June 2. Mahy,
winner of the 2006 Hans Christian Andersen Award and a two-time recipient of
Boston Globe–Horn Book Award honour book citations, marks her second
collaboration with English illustrator Polly Dunbar in Bubble Trouble, a
tongue-twisting tale about an airborne baby. The Washington Post describes the
picture book as "mixing acrobatic language and tongue-tangling rhymes to a
lighter-than-air offering" and a "launchpad for laughter." The
award ceremony will be held in the United States on October 2 at the Boston
Athenaeum in Boston. Acceptance speeches of the award winners will be published
in the January/February 2010 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. Mahy has published
over 200 titles.
(4 June 2009)
Weekend reflections
Grace Cleave, the protagonist of Janet Frame's 1963 novel Towards Another
Summer, is critiqued by columnist and author David Gates in The New York
Times' Sunday Book Review. "Except for David Copperfield, few
novels have endured a child's viewpoint more convincingly and
affectionately," writes Gates. "Towards Another Summer looks
back to Virginia Woolf in its focus on the tortuous internal positionings
beneath the surface of apparently casual conversation… And it looks ahead to
Mary Gaitskill's sense of a vivid inner ferocity." Towards Another
Summer reflects an actual weekend Frame endured in the north of England with
Guardian journalist Geoffrey Morrhouse, his wife and their two children.
"Like every writer worth remembering, Frame exploits — or creates on the
page, to be absolutely puristic about it — her peculiar sensibility, her private
window into the universal." Although written in 1963, Towards Another
Summer was not released until 2007, three years after Frame's death.
(17 May 2009)
Changing fiction
Auckland-based author Witi Ihimaera, 65, is in the process of reworking
earlier fiction saying that "as the author grows, so should their
stories." "Writers should be able to transform their stories in
whichever way they choose. And even if they do, the originals will still be
there," Ihimaera says. Ihimaera, a former diplomat, became the world's
first Maori novelist in 1973 with the novel Tangi, which he wrote at the
age of 28. The latest Tangi has been entirely rewritten and is twice the
length of the original, while The Matriarch is now just a fifth of its
former length. Ihimaera is the citizens' chair at the University of Hawaii, a
one-semester position that gave him a chance to finish writing The Trowenna
Sea. He will then rework the last of his original texts, The New Net Goes
Fishing, before crafting a fresh collection of short stories called The
Purity of Ice. "How could I look my ancestors in the eye if I had not
rewritten my books so they would become living, breathing, political people? I
have a long line of ancestors to whom I am accountable. I always return to my
source, which is the Waituhi Valley, where I was born."
(18 April 2009)
Is it or isn't it
University of Canterbury professor of philosophy Denis Dutton's latest book The
Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution — which supposes that
art appreciation stems first from evolutionary adaptions made during the
Pleistocene — is reviewed in The New York Times by fellow author
Anthony Gottlieb. "Some psychologists look to the Pleistocene epoch [for
the origins of art], which began about 1.6 million years ago, when — in the
course of some 80,000 generations of surviving and mating — our ancestors may
have evolved the instincts that led eventually to the works of Bach, Rembrandt
and Proust. 'Darwinian aesthetics' is what Denis Dutton, the author of The
Art Instinct, calls this idea, and he thinks its time has come." In the
early 1990s Dutton founded the lobby group The New Zealand Friends of Public
Broadcasting in response to proposals to devolve New Zealand's two
non-commercial public radio stations.
(29 January 2009)
Out of the dark
Auckland writer CK Stead's Collected Poems 1951-2006 is reviewed this
week in the Guardian. "The main stylistic influence on Stead is
probably Ezra Pound, from whom he has inherited a delight in iconoclastic
adaptations of classical poets. Here's his take on Catullus — 'Death, you
clever bugger / who would have credited you / with such finesse!' And the
sequence 'Walking Westward' (1979) is full of the colloquial rumbustiousness and
jarring disjunctions of the middle Cantos. The Black River (2007), the most
recent collection included here, has all the ambition, outspokenness and breadth
of reference of Stead's best writing." Christian Karlson Stead was
Professor of English at the University of Auckland until 1986, when he took up
writing full-time. He is a member of the Order of New Zealand.
(17 January 2009)
Thriller crashes onto shelves
Wellington author New York-based John Wareham's latest book The President's
Therapist and the Secret Intervention to Treat the Alcoholism of George Bush
hits US stores on January 20, Inauguration Day. The President's Therapist
is a serious psychological analysis of President George W. Bush uniquely
packaged as a political thriller. New York professor of literature Charles
Defanti has compared the New York-based Wareham's "hyper-realism" to
Tolstoy and Zola. "I found it just about impossible to believe I was
reading fiction," he said in a televised interview. "I'm still
wondering where John Wareham managed to pick up so much inside
information." In a review for The Washington Watch psychologist Dr
Jess Maghan, former director of training for the New York Police Department,
noted, "Even those Bushwhacked among us will find this book offering an
antidote to the nightmare of the Bush years." Wareham, 69, is author of
several bestsellers, including Secrets of a Corporate Headhunter, How
to Break Out of Prison and the 2003 novel, Chancey on Top. His firm,
Wareham Associates, specialises in corporate leadership selection and
development. He is founder and chief executive of The Eagles Foundation of
America, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the rehabilitation of prison
inmates.
(17 January 2009)
Introducing Tauwhitu
In a Kerikeri pub sometime in the 1980s, Boston author Christina Thompson met a
group of Maori having pints after a day spent diving for crayfish and uses this
first encounter with native New Zealanders as the starting point of her travel
memoir, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All. Thompson
continues with this meeting-of-alien-peoples theme as the link between the
memoir part of her book, in which she is cast as a kind of explorer charting new
cross-cultural territory in her relationship with Maori foundryman, Tauwhitu
("I was small and blond, he was a 6-foot-2, 200-pound Polynesian. I had a
Ph.D., he went to trade school"), and the history part (the European
discovery and colonisation of New Zealand). A Philadelphia Inquirer
review writes: "Charming, insightful, honest, balanced, the book offers a
unique look at the pressures of marriage across cultural, racial, and
geographical boundaries."
(20 July 2008)
Confronting history
Historian and media commentator Paul Moon's latest book This Horrid Practice
delves into the subject of Maori cannibalism, the author arguing that the amount
of evidence of the action was "overwhelming" and "too important
to ignore." Moon says the widespread practice of cannibalism was not a food
issue, rather that people were eaten often as part of post-battle rage. Horrid
Practice looks at how explorers and missionaries saw cannibalism, and in the
final chapter, Moon discusses why some academics still deny that it ever
happened. Moon is Professor of History at the Auckland University of
Technology's Te Ara Poutama, where he has taught since 1993. He is author of a
number of books, including biographies of Governors William Hobson and Robert
FitzRoy, and Nga Puhi chief, Hone Heke.
(6 August 2008)
Short lines hide
Wellington poet Bill Manhire takes the cover of the 2008 spring edition of
literary periodical Poetry London, in which his poems 'Song with a
Chorus', 'Velvet' and 'The Carpe Diem Poem' appear. Manhire read his verse
alongside UK author and poet Frank D'Aguiar at the launch of the summer issue of
the publication in London's Gallery of Foyles Bookshop. From 'Velvet': 'For only
a deer in solitude can be a 165, / can turn and be this other thing entire, / a
great head watching from the wall.' Manhire's Three Poems is reviewed in
the London Review of
Books. He is director of the International Institute of Modern Letters
at Victoria University in Wellington.
(June 2008)
Autumn and rainbows
From Takaka, Telegraph foreign correspondent Peter Foster writes a weekly
blog on life in the small South Island town, population: 1,182. Foster was the Telegraph's
South Asia Correspondent for four years until January 2008 when he moved to live
at the bottom of the world with his wife and three small children. This week,
"autumn quite suddenly arrived in Golden Bay". "The trees, the
livestock, the waves and rocks all throw long, low shadows ... It's only early
afternoon, but the light is already fading and next door have fired up their
'burner' so the garden hangs with the sweet smell of wood-smoke." Foster
marvels New Zealand rainbows, "fairy-tale toadstools" and bakes a
steak and mushroom pie.
(May 2008)
Lucky Dagg at the Logies
Comedian and writer John Clarke, born in Palmerston North and famous for
creating the "elegantly dressed" farmer Fred Dagg and his seven sons,
all Trevors, will be inducted into the Australian Logies Hall of Fame in a
ceremony in Melbourne on May 4. Clarke first became known in 1975 for portraying
the laconic New Zealander, when he released the singles, 'Traditional
Air'/'Unlabelled', and 'We Don't Know How Lucky We Are'/'Larry Loves Barry'.
"I'm inclined to regard this as a youth encouragement award," Clarke
said when informed of his win. "I'm deeply grateful and will do what I
can." Clarke lives and performs in Australia.
(21 April 2008)
Farewell to a literary legend
Hone
Tuwhare, one of NZ's most distinguished and best-loved writers, has died in
Dunedin aged 86. Tuwhare was the first Maori poet to be published in English (No
Ordinary Sun, 1964) and one of the leading figures in the Maori cultural
renaissance of the 1970s. Born in Kaikohe of Ngapuhi descent, Tuwhare spoke only
Maori until the age of nine. He began writing in 1939, combining ancient Maori
myth with contemporary political issues in a uniquely accessible style. Maori
Party MP Hone Harawira said Hone Tuwhare was a writer who could "say what
people really felt in their bones…You just have to look at his poetry to see
his love of people and his deep sadness at the impacts of man on the
world." Tuwhare won two Montana NZ Book Awards for poetry in 1998 and 2002,
and was given honorary doctorates by the universities of Auckland and Otago. He
was made NZ's second Te Mata Poet Laureate in 1999.
(17 January 2008)
Writing for change
Icon Books (UK) has just released its third edition of 50
Facts That Should Change the World, the best-selling book by NZ
journalist Jessica Williams. 50 Facts aims to shock readers into social
and political action by drawing their attention to some of the more alarming
characteristics of modern-day life. Williams devotes a chapter to each of her
hard-hitting facts, which include the number of slaves in the world today (27
million) and the proportion of British children who think they'll find fame
through reality TV (one in six). "One of the things I wanted to say in the
book is that even if you do something small, if everybody does it, it actually
makes a really big difference," said Williams in an interview with NZ's Sunday
Star-Times. Williams, 37, was born in Wanganui and is currently based in
London, where she produces the BBC's influential Hard Talk
program.
(14 November 2007)
Booker number two?
Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip has made the Man Booker Prize longlist, alongside works
by Ian McEwan and A N Wilson. The 13 titles were selected from over 100
international entries. "As for the eventual winner, the smart money will,
inevitably, fly to McEwan's On Chesil Beach," writes Guardian critic DJ
Taylor. "I shall be backing the New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones's Mr Pip, a
devastating projection of Great Expectations set on a war-torn Pacific
island." Keri Hulme is the first and only NZ author to win the prestigious
prize, for The Bone People in 1985. The shortlist will be announced September
6.
(8 August 2007)
Devastating simplicity
Mister Pip, the Commonwealth Prize-winning novel by Wellingtonian Lloyd Jones,
is praised both for its lyricism and its deft handling of post-colonial issues
in the Guardian. "The simplicity with which he describes the atrocities
that take place [in Bougainville] is devastating," writes reviewer Olivia
Laing. "But it is the great faith that Jones has in literature, to effect
change no less than to offer solace, that gives this extraordinary book its
charge." Mister Pip is the first book by Lloyd Jones to be released in the
UK.
(7 July 2007)
In the frame
Scottish author Andrew O'Hagan's inspiring opening address at this month's
Sydney Writers' Festival included mention of NZ literary great, Janet Frame. The
author of Living in the Maniototo, The Edge of the Alphabet and An Angel at My
Table was listed alongside Oscar Wilde and Tennessee Williams as writers notable
for their "bids for sexual freedom". Frame died in 2004 aged 79. Read
her NZ Edge Heroes entry here.
(31 May 2007)
"A little savage from New Zealand"
A Telegraph review of Penguin's Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
celebrates the influential author's short yet remarkable life. Born in
Wellington in 1888, Mansfield made a strong and lasting impression on the London
literary scene before her death from tuberculosis aged 32. In her lifetime she
was a friend and muse to D.H Lawrence and rival to Virginia Woolf; since her
death her work has inspired authors as diverse as Philip Larkin, Angela Carter
and Willa Cather. Telegraph: "According to the different claims of her
various biographers and critics ... she's been a sweet and wholesome tragic
victim, a selfish dark-eyed piece of trouble, a feminist, an anti-feminist, a
satirist, a sentimentalist, a miniaturist, an overinflated reputation, a
repressed lesbian, a colonial bisexual angel-devil plagiarist original."
Mansfield is widely viewed as a master of the short story form. The greatest
examples of her work - all featured in the new Penguin collection - include At
the Bay, The Garden-Party, The Doll's House and A Married Man's
Story.
(7 April 2007)
Writing in the margins
Auckland writer Tzeming Mok spoke about globalization and the Chinese
Diaspora at last month's Shanghai Literature Festival. Mok, a published poet,
author, blogger and journalist, is known for writing about issues of
displacement, with a focus on what it means to be Chinese today. "This is
the time of the post-Amy Tan generation," said Mok in the Shanghai Daily.
"For Tan, China is the faraway homeland, somewhere in the past, a memory;
for young writers like me, China is the reality, which no one can avoid."
Mok will spend the next three months in Beijing developing short story ideas and
working on her first novel: an observational piece set in Auckland's Chinese
community in the 1990s.
(2 April 2007)
Smither reveals wild side over tea and cake
NZ poet laureate Elizabeth Smither was a guest speaker at the recent Kuala
Lumpur International Literary Festival. A journalist interviewing her for the
Malaysian Star was amazed at her calm and easygoing persona, which seemed to be
at odds with her intense artistic output. "I have a surface that looks
conforming," she agreed, "but French novelist Gustave Flaubert had it
right about 'keeping your surface bourgeois, and being wild underneath. I think
the wildness should go in the writing, that's the best place for it." Based
in New Plymouth, 65-year-old Smither has published 15 collections of poetry,
five novels and four collections of short stories. Says New York critic Nicholas
Birns, "Smither writes concise, intelligent poems that sometimes exhort,
sometimes muse, sometimes simply watch."
(1 April 2007)
Card sharks revealed
Swimming with the Devil Fish, Des Wilson's timely history of the British poker
scene, gets a great review in the Guardian. "While the US market is
saturated with poker manuals and ghosted autobiographies, the rich story of
poker in Britain has never before been told. This is what Wilson offers,
revealingly and compellingly, in a labour of love driven at cracking pace by his
trademark breathless enthusiasm." Born in NZ, Wilson settled in the UK in
the 1960s. Now retired, his diverse career included founding housing charity
Shelter, running Friends of the Earth, acting as Chairman of the Campaign for
Freedom of Information, managing Paddy Ashdown's Liberal Democrats election
campaign, serving on the English Cricket Board, and enjoying a lengthy stint as
Director of Corporate and Public Affairs for airport giant BAA.
(11 June 2006)
Weldon in class and on screen
NZ raised novelist Fay Weldon has signed on to teach creative writing at Brunel
University, as part of the UK institution's new MA course. The prolific writer
of bestsellers including Puff Ball, Praxis and Auto da Fay aims to bring her own
brand of lawlessness to the course. "There's a huge gap between how people
say writing is done and how writers actually do it," she says. "So my
main job will be to inject a bit of anarchy into the system." Puff Ball
(1983) is currently being made into a film, directed by Nick Roeg and starring
veteran actor Donald Sutherland.
(16 May 2006)
Baigent down but not out
The Guardian interviews NZ born writer and historian Michael Baigent - "the
man who sued Dan Brown and lost." Baigent co-authored The Holy Blood and
the Holy Grail with Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Baigent and Leigh sued
Random House - publishers of both Holy Blood and Brown's blockbuster The Da
Vinci Code - for breach of intellectual property, and were resoundingly
defeated. "We weren't just trying to get a bit of Dan Brown's money, and we
were certainly not doing it for the publicity," says Baigent. "I've
calculated that I'd have to sell an extra nine million copies of the Holy Blood
to pay the legal bill - that's very expensive publicity indeed. But what have
writers got except the intellectual copyright in their work?" Baigent's new
work, The Jesus Papers, is published by Harper Collins.
(17 May 2006)
Her mother's daughter
Linda Carroll, therapist, writer and mother of Courtney Love has written her
memoirs, which include an account of the family's unconventional attempt to live
an alternative lifestyle in Nelson and their struggle to deal with their wild
child. The memoirs document Love's turbulent experiences in the Nelson commune
community of the 1970s, as she was passed between caregivers, schools and
relatives both in New Zealand and the US. Her
Mother's Daughter has been labelled a pre-emptive strike from Carroll,
in anticipation of Love's planned release of "intimate" journals later
this year.
(March 2006)
Book world's reigning queen
Literary doyenne Liz Calder, co-founder of Bloomsbury Press and nurturer of such
talents as Salman Rushdie, Anita Brookner, Julian Barnes and J.K Rowling, has
continued her success with the establishment of the Festa Literaria
Internacional de Parati in Brazil. Founded in 2003, FLIP is the first literary
festival to be held in South America. It drew 12,000 people in its first year
and earned Calder an Order of Merit for services to culture from Brazilian
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Calder was born in Middlesex and educated
at Palmerston North Girls' High and Canterbury
University. Her love affair with Brazil began after working as a model and
journalist there in the 1960s. Calder may have stepped down from the
directorship at Bloomsbury but her influence still resonates in the publishing
world. Says good friend, Virago Press founder Carmen Calill, "[she is]
probably the most magnificent of the generation of women who changed things; who
moved the centre of the universe, of vision, and gave it a jolt."
(2 July 2005)
Massey University PhD and Wairarapa philosopher Derek Mesler has been published
by the MIT Press. The Act of Thinking is “the work of a mature, sophisticated
and profound thinker who may just have written the most original and important
book in philosophy of mind to have appeared in over a decade. The title of
Melser's book encapsulates its thesis, which is that thinking is not a process,
either biological or mental, but an action, which we have to learn from others
how to perform. Briefly, it means that thinking is not a recondite process
in a private inner theater, either physical or spiritual, but an observable
activity. The reasons to believe this are to be found in a study of how we
acquire the capacity to carry on this activity, which we learn from others.” Max
Hocutt
.
(2005)
Almost kiwi
Best-selling British author, Alexander
McCall Smith, (No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency) revealed a Kiwi connection
while in the country promoting his latest book. McCall Smith’s doctor father,
George McCall Smith, ran off with a patient to NZ in 1914, scandalously leaving
his wife and four children behind in Scotland. McCall Smith Snr set up a clinic
in Hokianga where, according to his son, “he was very much liked.”
(9 August 2005)
King more than qualified for role of national historian
C.K Stead reviewed the late Michael
King's Penguin History of New Zealand for the Times Literary
Supplement, making some keen observations of his own on the subject. "If it
were possible to subtract the Maori element from NZ history then the story would
be remarkable only in an entirely unremarkable way, offering yet another
illustration of the human capacity for hard work, optimism, endurance,
adaptability and (on the whole) triumph against the odds [...] That is how it
all seems if you leave out the Maori element which is, however, the most
complex, intractable, interesting and enduring part of the story, and the part
the late Michael King, a Pakeha, the biographer of two Maori leaders, who had
learned Maori language and customs, was well qualified to deal with." Stead's
cover story was one of several dealing with Pacific art and culture in the June
11 TLS.
(11 June 2004)
Stead's dazzling portrait
CK Stead's novel about Katherine
Mansfield succeeds on several levels, portraying Mansfield as human, flawed, in
love, highly intelligent and excited about her career. He believes that what is
important is the life and work of our great writers, and not the manner of their
death. "A fine achievement, rich in sobriety and purpose, in warmth and
dazzling light."
( 16 May 2004)
The world according to Bob
Bob MacLaren – writer, comedian, and host of the Discovery Channel’s wacky
travel show, Bob’s World – interviewed in the Star. “The idea was to take
ourselves not just to the level of your standard travel programme, and to
standard destinations, but to the mad places in the world where reality has been
twisted out of shape a little bit.” Examples given include St Moritz and Monaco
(“insultingly rich people who gather and play in ridiculous ways”), Las Vegas
(“just a façade for a giant money-making extravaganza”) and Benidorm (“basically
a geriatric theme park”). Bob’s World was originally screened in the UK
and has recently gone global.
(3 April 2004)
"A fascinating man"
The Scotsman profiles Brian
Turner - NZ's poet laureate, brother to Brian (golf) and Glenn (cricket), and
part-time caddie. Turner takes two months off writing each year to hit the
greens, this time alongside Australian professional Peter Fowler. He is the
author of 10 volumes of poetry and numerous essays, and has ghost-written the
biographies of such NZ sports luminaries as Colin Meads and Josh Kronfeld.
(30 May 2004)
Colonial bad girl
Claire Tomalin reminisces about the
fascinating subject of her 1987 biography, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life.
"Mansfield
has often been seen as one of the bad girls of literature. And it's true that
she was made of ambiguities. The best of her writing strikes to the heart, sharp
and clear ... In the conduct of her life too, she was all energy, wit and
intelligence, adored for her charm and beauty ... Her appetite for experience
led her to play the part of the wild colonial girl to its limits." A Secret
Life was re-issued in December with a new jacket (above) featuring the only
portrait of Mansfield known to have been done from life.
(29 November 2003)
Illness in body, not in mind
In reviewing The Selected Letters of D.H Lawrence, Straits Times
writer Richard Lim refers to Katherine Mansfield who, like Lawrence, suffered
and eventually died from tuberculosis. Said Mansfield of her illness, “…even my
present state of health is a great gain. It makes things so rich, so important,
so longed for... Since this little attack I've had, a queer thing has happened.
I feel that my love and longing for the external world - I mean the world of
nature - has suddenly increased a million times. When I think of the little
flowers that grow in the grass, and the little streams and places where we can
lie and look up at the clouds - oh, I simply ache for them...”
(7 September 2003)
International man of history
C.K Stead is one of the “international sensations” lined up for the
Banff-Calgary International Writers Festival in Canada. The Secret History of
Modernism author will join E. Annie Proulx, Jasper Fforde, Joan London, and
Alberto Ruy-Sanchez at the event, which runs October 15-19.
(4 September 2003)
Wellington wordsmiths mash it up
Wellington authors Damien Wilkins and
Elizabeth Knox have been nominated for the 2004
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Their novels, Chemistry and Billie's Kiss, are both in the running for a NZ$196,000 prize, whose
previous winners include David Malouf, Michel Houellebecq, and Orhan Pamuk. Chemistry - Wilkins' tale of drug addiction and dysfunctional families in
small-town NZ - was recently praised in the Guardian.
"Addiction and its results saturate this powerful novel, even as Wilkins
strips his characters bare […] Like an Antipodean A.M Homes, Wilkins describes
the grimmer side of suburban life in an utterly modern telling that is as
truthful as it is poignant." Meanwhile Knox's award-winning The
Vintner's Luck is to be released in translation by French publishing
house,
Le fil invisible, as part of a series promoting Down Under authors.
(9 August 2003)
Sarah-Kate Lynch's sure-to-rise Kitchen
Ex-NZ Women's Weekly editor, Sarah-Kate Lynch, interviewed in Canada's National
Post about her first novel - Blessed are the Cheesemakers. The tale
of a cheese-making couple and their musical cows has been optioned by Working
Title Films, the company behind two of Lynch's favourite movies; Bridget
Jones' Diary and Billy Elliot. Showing her true colours as a former
food writer, her next novel - By Bread Alone - is about a "woman
who bakes sourdough bread and avoids the tragedy of her present by dreaming
about the passion of her past."
(19 July 2003)
Living the high life
Sir Edmund Hillary received a hero's welcome in London at an hour-long signing
of his books High Adventure and View from the Summit. Dozens of
admirers queued in the rain for a chance to meet Sir Ed, with the earliest
arriving at 5am for the 11am signing. First published in 1955, High Adventure
was reissued in Britain earlier this year to commemorate the 50th anniversary of
Hillary's Everest conquest.
(3 June 2003)
Welding the past
Auto da Fay, Fay Weldon's memoirs spanning her NZ upbringing and early
adulthood in
London, reviewed in the New York Times. "You hesitate to label Auto
da Fay - a virtuoso triple pun on inquisitorial self-punishment - as
[Weldon's] first venture at memoir because so much of its material shows up as
roots for her novels. So do the wit, the shrewdly disconcerting marksmanship,
the refusal to engage herself even with herself … What jolts the attention
back is eruptions of incandescence, something other than warmth."
(11 June 2003)
A novel life
Margaret Birkinshaw, mother of NZ-edged
novelist Fay Weldon and acclaimed author in her own right, has died aged 95.
Renowned for her passion, confidence and sense of adventure, many lament her
refusal to pen her own autobiography. Instead she left a legacy of romantic
novels praised by Shaw and Wells for their "wisdom and vitality."
(24 January 2003)
"The Prospero of NZ letters"
"Take a Las Vegas gambling
magnate who believes in the usefulness of books, add a distinguished poet and a
betting pool of natural talent. What do you get? A literary renaissance that has
floored critics in the land of the long white cloud." Australian Financial Review
profiles Bill "the Magus" Manhire, whose prestigious Victoria
University creative writing course has spawned talent attracting international
attention, the stable includes Emily Perkins, Elizabeth Knox and Catherine
Chidley (see LATimes review below) and latest bet Paula Morris.
(13 December 2002)
Not all doom and gloom
Wellington author Damien
Wilkins counters small-town unease and drug-addled characters with a good dose
of black comedy in Chemistry. New Statesman: "[Wilkins creates] a
world of jealousies, scandals, and suffocating boredom … Although
unrepentantly gloomy, a dark, addictive humour pervades this novel of doomed
domesticity."
(25 November 2002)
Critic goes ga ga for Noble
Reviewed: Justin Paton's, Anne
Noble: States of Grace, the accompaniment to Noble's epoynmous recent
exhibition. The book, "is the type of publication that makes people pat
books in bookstores […] one finds oneself turning the pages slowly; absorbing
and being absorbed by Noble's still and resonant images." Paton's words,
"seem to take the reader by the hand and lead them on a sensitive, and
somehow very personal interpretation of the artist's work to date."
(August 2002)
Reforging Paradise
"No one likes snapshots of one
sitting on Mother's knee being shown at one's 21st birthday, especially if the
snaps were taken at age 19." Novelist Emily Perkins reviws James Belich's
history of NZ: If we, "are to confront previously unexplored realities of
the past 150 years, and approach the future accepting the positive outcomes of
this history - transnationalism, cultural hybridity - without the collective
amnesia that perpetuates a national identity crisis, this is the book to show
them the way." Buy
Paradise Reforged in the NZEDGE emporium.
(6 July 2002)
Pharmaceuticals and Fox Boys for the summer
The Guardian/Observer surveys what's hot on reading lists for the warmer months up over. Jim Crace
(Being Dead, Quarantine) is looking forward to Damien Wilkins's Chemistry
amongst writers he's "encountered and enjoyed before", and NZ actress Kerry
Fox will be digging into Peter Walker's gripping The Fox Boy.
"It's so much to do with where I come from in New Zealand, and is about a
Maori boy who is taken into the white world." Wilkins is an occasional
contributor to NZEDGE. click here
for his excellent piece on Katherine Mansfield and here
to buy The Fox Boy.
(29 June 2002)
Critique of Pure Fay
Fay Weldon's autobiography (up to year 32) continues to entertain. The
Guardian is seduced by the lure of biography: "her fiction suddenly seems a whole lot less
peculiar ... much of the work reads as if it had been dictated, in high
spirits, after dinner". The
Irish Independent: "self-invention and self-reinvention are much of
what this very entertaining half-life is about." But luckily, "to her
credit, Weldon doesn't try to tie it up all too neatly." Of course not ... we
have to have a reason to hang out for 32+.
(June 2002)
The novel is dead, long live the novel
Keri Hulme joins a list of postcolonial booker people ratttling the bones of the
form: "The years the Booker Prize doesn't go to an English novel the
winning book tends to be an interesting one. The most interesting books have
been by a Nigerian (Ben Okri), a Maori (Keri Hulme), two Indians (Salman Rushdie
and Arundhati Roy), a Trinidadian (VS Naipaul) and a Canadian (Margaret
Atwood).
(26 May 2002)
"Swift and edgy"...
Denver Post review of Margaret Mahy's
new book 24 Hours. "Her writing is clean and spare, as lucid
in describing the ponderous weight of a backpack as in narrating an unnerving
car chase". Also, Mahy was nominated for children's literature highest
honour - the 2002 Hans Christian Andersen Award.
(17 March 2002)
NYNZ - fringe thrills
Chris
Niles's new novel Hell's Kitchen well-received in the Big Bad
Apple: "Here's a novel that's crowded, rushed, excited,
mixed-up, fun, dangerous and a little dirty. In other words, it perfectly
matches its Manhattan setting [...] What's the secret ingredient that gives this
novel its deliciously Gotham flavour? An outsider slant: Chris Niles is a recent
arrival, a New Zealander who led a peripatetic life before settling down in
Brooklyn. Tye Fischer, another recent arrival, knows she has to "get New
York in a headlock before it trample[s] all over her". Ms Niles' embrace of
the city is just as fervent; she loves it, killers and all.
(26 February 2002)
Publishing Gem
Author Fay Weldon, who spent her childhood in New Zealand, has divided
the literary world with her latest novel, The
Bulgari Connection. It's sponsored by the Italian jewellery company in what Weldon describes as "a good
piece of advertising
prose".
(4 September 2001)
Perkins short cuts to praise
The Guardian Review draws comparisons between Perkins's tale of small town
angst and the American master of the form: "Perkins has wonderfully light touch; she is a master of dialogue and
plain speech, a casual Carver for our times."
(22 July 2001)
The new girl
Emily Perkins is "an adventurous writer" whose recent novel, The
New Girl is an "ambitious work, rich with creative tension", and a
"huge leap" for a writer whose first two books met with critical and
popular acclaim.
(30 June 2001)
A day in the life
Margaret Mahy's 24 Hours confirms her place among the "world's
best". Her books for young adults "are not easy reads, but they are
hugely rewarding, emotionally and intellectually". Also, Mahy at The
Hub in Edinburgh.
(22 May 2001)
Lending right
New Zealand pioneered the public lending right, where writers collect
royalties on books borrowed from libraries. An excellent system says Dianne
Highbridge.
(15 April 2001)
Inside the Frame
Michael King's biography of Janet Frame, "laureate of the musing
inner-self," is "elegantly written, densely
researched and remorselessly long" - but does it over-expose its subject?
(8 April 2001)
Kraus purposes
“If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped
within the ‘personal,’ why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it
the subject of our art?” asks Edge-thinker Chris Kraus.
(19 January 2001)
Janet and John revamped
Janet and John, the New Zealand-authored, internationally successful
learn-to-read books of the fifties and sixties are making a come-back in
ethnically-inclusive, non-sexist but still easy-to-read versions.
(9 January 2001)
Kiss and tell
British politician John Prescott retains the edge bestowed by his starring
role in New Zealander Fleur Adcock's 1996 poem: "Our eyes had locked/we
were leaning avidly forwards/lips out thrust..."
(28 November 2000)
Murder on the Street
Shirker, penned by New Zealander Chad Taylor features a murder on
Shortland Street - the place, not the programme.
(26 November 2000)
Dogs of Auckland
Robert Creeley's Dogs of Auckland sequence grew from the poet's
extended stay in his wife's native New Zealand: "Isolation seduces and terrorizes" him. But at
times, as toward the end of Edges, Creeley rediscovers that "One is
included".
(October 2000)
Mr Parsons'
mystery
New Zealand-born thriller writer Julie Parsons featured in a
British TV series, True Lives. She was filmed returning to New
Zealand, the scene of her father's mysterious disappearance all those years
before...
(24 September 2000)
Starbright and the dreameater
Kiwi author Joy Cowley gets a glowing review for her latest childrens' book
whose story "could be a mix of the 'X-files' and 'Nightmare on Elm Street'... The plot may be hokey, especially to non-aficionados of sci-fi (such as this
reviewer), but Cowley's imaginative use of language (Starbright makes up her own
words when the usual ones won't do) and lyrical evocations of setting and
emotion make this book soar above others of its ilk."
(20 August 2000)
Poetic shock tactics
An extensive Guardian profile of New Zealand poet Fleur Adcock that
elaborates on everything from her OBE, the end of her muse, her relationship
with Barry Crump ("New Zealand's answer to George Best or Gazza") to
the "Pure Adcockian shock tactic... something wickedly sharp that suddenly
leaps from the fastidious formality of rhyme and meter and bites you on the
bum."
(29 July 2000)
Going to work on a memoir
NZ-edged Fay Weldon has signed a reputed £250 000 deal with publishers Harper Collins to
write her memoirs, The Word, the Flesh and the She-Devil, a frank account
of life, love, religion, psychoanalysis and the pain and pleasure of the
creative process. While working in advertising Weldon famously coined the slogan
"Go to work on an egg."
(13 May 2000)
Talk the walk: From a Maori grave in Crete to dithering dons at Oxford
Times review: "CK Stead's eigth novel Talking about O'Dwyer
is an inticate interrogation of the past ... The sweep of Stead's narrative pays
dividends: there's almost a wistful nostalgia, a sense that hanging onto the
past is itself a curse".
(4 May 2000)
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