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Newzedge 2009 July–Dec (355 items)
Newzedge 2009 Jan–June (415 items)
Newzedge 2008
(507 items)

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Newzedge 2006 (327 items)

Note: links in archived stories may have expired due to the removal of the stories from, or changes to, the websites from which they were derived.






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)

 


 

Read globe story

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)


 

Read Guardian article
Joanna Bourke
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)
   



Read Cleveland story
Read Cleveland story
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)


 

Read NYT review
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)
   



Read Guardian obituary
"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)



Read Guardian review
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)
    



Read Silver Bullet story

Read Silver Bullet story
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)



Read Australian story
'Daylight'
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)
     



Read Age story
Beryl Fletcher
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)



Read Guardian article

A Little Piece of Ground
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)



Read Australian article

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)
    



Go to Guardian story
Bill Manhire

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)
   
   



Read SMH article


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)


 

Go to Guardian poll

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)
   



Read Age profile

"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)
    



Read Newsday story


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)



Read Guardian review
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)
   



Read Guardian review

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)



Read LA Times article
The Strength of the Sun
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)
      



Read Observer article
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)
        



Go to the Guardian story
Go to the Guardian story

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)
       



Go to the Moscow Times review
Go to the Moscow Times story
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)
         



Go ot the Times Literary Supplement Review

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)



Go to Ananova story
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)
               



Read a Guardian review of the biography
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)
          



Go to the Guardian story

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)
                



 Go to the Belfast Telegraph story
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)
        



Go the story
Click for the Independent story

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)
          




Go to Sunday Times article
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)
                 



Go to The Times
Scholar honoured
New Zealand novelist, poet, critic and scholar Professor Karl Stead awarded an honorary doctorate  by Bristol University.
(20 June 2001)
                  


Go to Canoe story
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) 
                  



Go to The Times article
Writer's birthday
The 13 of March is the birthday of novelist, Sir Hugh Walpole, born in Auckland in 1884.
(13 March 2001)
                 



Go to the Age story
Go to The Age story
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)



Go to The Telegraph story
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)
                  



Go to Chicago Tribune review
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)
               



Go to Sctosman article
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)
               



Go to Ottawa article
 Go to Ottawa article
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)
             



Go to Books Online site
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)
                  



Go to Sydney Morning Herald Article
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)
               



Go to The Age article
Go to The Age article
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)



Go to Unte Reader Online
Go to Unte Reader Online
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)



Go to the Sunday Times story
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)
                  



 Go to the Guardian Unlimited story
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)
              



go to the Irish Times Story

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)



Goto the Feed article
"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) 
                     



Go to the Chad Taylor review
"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)



Go to the Times article
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)

                             



Go to the BBC story
Go to the BBC story
"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)   
 



Go to the New Statesman story

Go to the Fay Weldon bio
"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)


Go to the Alicubi article
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)
                 



go to the New Statesman story
see Weldon's book "Big Women"
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)



Go to the Voice story

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)
              



Go to the guardian unlimitrd story

Go to the Guardian Unlimited story
"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)



Go to the Guardian Unlimited story
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)
             


go to the Bomb site story
go to the Bomb site story
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)



go to the Sunday Times
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)
              



go to the Commonwealth Writers story
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)
                


Go to The Age story
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)
                  




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)

 



Read grimnetz story


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)


Read Baltimore Sun story

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)

 


 

Read Amazon review
"The Nature of Dwellings"
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)
  



Read NYT story

Strength of the Sun
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)
    



Read Guardian story

Neil Cross
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)
    



Go to TLS website
'Change of Heart'
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)



Read Guardian obituary

Read Guardian obituary
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)
  



Read Age story

'Sky Dancer'
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)
    



Janet Frame

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)



Read Herald article

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)



Read Yomiuri review
'Voyaging the Pacific'
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)
 



Read SMH review
Annamarie Jagose
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)



Read CBC story
Manhire, Watchel, O'Brien, Knox

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)
   



Read Times story
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)
   



Read Australian story

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)

   


Read Observer review

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)
          



Go to Star Bulletin review
Lynda Chanwai-Earle
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)
   



Read SMH article

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)
      



Go to Art Monthly site
Go to Auckland Uni Press site
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)
        



Go to the Guardian story
Go to the Guardian story
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)
           



Go to the NY Post story

 
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)
              


Go to the Guardian obit.
Go to the Gaurdian story
"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)
          



Go to the Yahoo story
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)
             



Go to All Africa article

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)
           



Go to Guardian article
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)
              



Go to Orange site
Go to Orange site
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)



Go to Daily Star story
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)
                    



Go to International Herald Tribune article
Cyber-verse
Cultural export poet Andrew Johnston pushes poetry on the web.
(19 February 2001)
           



Go to Star review
Mahy magic
Margaret Mahy's 24 Hours, her latest teen novel released in America, is "compelling and emotionally satisfying".
(26 November 2000) 
                  



Go to Salon article
Go to the Salon article

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)
                



Go to Books Online
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)
                 



Go to the SMH story
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)
                       





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)





Damien Wilkins
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)

 



Read Times story


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)


 

Go to LSE website
Kim Sterelny
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)
  


Read Seattle PI story
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)
   



Read Independent review
'Mansfield'
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)
 



Read Allen&Unwin review
'Master of the Ceremonies'
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)
   



Read Guardian story
'The Trial of the Cannibal Dog'
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)

    



Read Statesman story
Will Marks
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)



Read Guardian review
'The Scornful Moon,' by Maurice Gee
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)



Read NYT article
Keri Hulme
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)
   



Read Guardian story
Southern Exposure
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)



Go to Herald story
Janet Frame
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)
   



Read Yahoo story
The Tournament cover
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)



Read Scotsman article
Sydney Goodsir Smith

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)
   



Got to SWF site

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)
   



Read Australian story

"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) 
   



Go to SMH review

John Clarke
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)
        



click here for a pdf of the article
click here for a pdf of the article
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)
        



Go to the Guardian review
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)
          



Go to the Yomiuri Online story

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)
 



Go to the Age story
Go to the Age story
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)
               



Go to Miami Herald article
Go to Miami Herlad article

"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)
           



Go to the Pdf of the Yahoo story
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)



Go to The Independent story
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)
     



Go to the pdf of theTimes of India story
Vintage reporter
Eric Young: kiwi journalist with one eye on the game, one on his glass.
Pdf Copy
(26 May 2001) 
                 



Go to Sunday Times story
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)
              



Go to the Sydney Morning Herald Story
Go to Sydney Morning Herald story.
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)
             



Go to The Age story
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)
                



Go to Las Vegas Sun article
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)
      



Go to Guardian story
Go to The Guardian story
Domestic goddess

Christmas brings out the "Nigella domestic goddess" in New Zealand lesbian-crime writer Stella Duffy.
(23 December 2000)
 



Go to Brisbane Writers Festival article
Go to Brisbane Writers Festival article
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)
 



Go to EJ Online article
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)
              




 



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)

 


 

Read Guardian story

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)

 


 

Read Guardian story

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)


 

Read SFGate story

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)



Read Stuff article
Alexander McCall-Smith
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)
  


 

Go to TLS website
Read The Normal Ones by C.K Steed
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)



Go to Scotman.com artical

Go to Scotman.com artical
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)



Read Star interview
Bob MacLaren
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)
   



Read Scotsman story

Read Brian Turner
"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)



Read Guardian story
Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life
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)
   



Read Strait Times article
Katherine Mansfield
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)
  



Read Calgary Herald story
C.K Stead
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)



Read Guardian article


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)
   



Read National Post story

Blessed are the Cheesemakers
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)



Read Scotsman article
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)
   



Read NYT review
Auto Da Fay

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)
     




Read Times obituary

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)
   



Read PDF of Financial Review article

"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)
    



Go to New Statesman review
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)
      



Go to the Denver Post article
"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)
           



Go to the New York Observer review
Go to the New York Observer review

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)
        



Go to the story
Go to the Gaurdian story
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)
           



Go to the Guardian article
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)
                



Go to The Telegraph article
Go to The Telegraph story
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) 
                    



Go to Guardian Unlimited story
Go to Guardian review
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)



Go to Yomuri story
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)
                 



Go to Guardian Unlimited story
Go to The Guardian Story
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)



Go to LA Weekly story
Go to LA Weekly story
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)
 



Go to BBC story
Go to BBC story
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)
   



Go to Times story
Go to the Times article
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)
               



Go to Boston Review story
Go to Boston Review review
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)    
               



Go to The Sunday Times article
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) 
              



Go to the Chicago Tribune story
Go to the Chicago Tribune story
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)  
 


Go to, the Guardian story
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)
                 



                
Go to the Independent story
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)
                     



Go to the Sunday Times story
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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