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Castaway tales from edge of the world
The latest book by Wellington maritime historian Joan
Druett uses personal memoirs to recount two very different survival stories
on the Auckland Islands, 500km south of NZ. Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked
on the Edge of the World tells the tale of two British ships stranded on
opposite sides of the main island in 1864, and the wildly different experiences
had by their respective crews. "If the southern part of Auckland Island is
all Robinson Crusoe," writes the Toronto Star reviewer,
"the northern part is more Lord of the Flies." Druett has
written ten non-fiction books and seven novels, most of which share a historical
maritime theme. Almost all her works have been published first in the US, where
she has received numerous awards. Her 1998 book Hen Frigates won a place
in the New York Public Library's list of Twenty-Five Best Books to
Remember.
(4 August 2007)
Top shelf Wellington author
Lloyd Jones has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize overall best book award for
his novel Mister Pip. The NZ $27,400 cheque was presented to Jones at the
Calabash Literary Festival in St Elizabeth, Jamaica, along with an invitation
for tea with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Described by the Prize's chief
judge as "mesmerising", Mister Pip is a story about the transformative
power of literature set in war-torn Bougainville in the early 1990s. "There
are so many books in the world and it's hard for each of them to find any
space," said Jones. "Competitions like this, with some prestige,
suddenly put that book up in its own little shelf, as it were." Jones
became known as NZ's first "million dollar author" with the foreign
rights sale for Mister Pip. He leaves for Germany next month to begin a Creative
New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency.
(3 June 2007)
The way of Music
The Way of Music by Robin Maconie (pictured), a New Zealand born composer
and musicologist who studied with Olivier Messiaen and Karlheinz Stockhausen, is
a listener's guide to the hidden meanings of western classical music, language
and drawing on universal listening experiences and skills. It is a study guide
in hearing and communication processes (using the example of a barking dog eg
“In a bark, a dog exists”), acoustics and performance, a history of western
music and culture through a survey of 100+ examples of recorded music, and
class, gender, and cultural perspectives found in adult responses to the slow
movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4. Published by Maryland’s
Scarecrow Press, The Way of Music is another instalment in Robin Maconie’s
programme to provide New Zealand with a core classic music textbook collection.
(May 2007)
NZ escapes "affluenza" virus
NZ gets off relatively
lightly in UK psychologist Oliver James's treatise on rampant materialism, Affluenza:
How to be Successful and Stay Sane. James defines affluenza as an unhealthy
obsession with wealth which has led to epidemic levels of depression,
over-consumption and spiritual emptiness in the developed world. To research the
book, James interviewed 240 people in the US, Singapore, Australia, China,
Denmark, NZ and the UK. After spending three months in NZ in 2004 he found its
citizens to be comparatively unaffected by what he terms "selfish
capitalism." "The New Zealanders are the most individualistic nation
on earth, even more so than the Americans," he writes. "But I suspect
New Zealand individualism takes a much more genuine form than that confected in
America." The publication of Affluenza in NZ has caused widespread media
speculation as to who the prominent interviewees really are.
(27 January 2007)
Darkly brilliant
Award-winning NZ author Carl Shuker has released his second novel to
immediate acclaim. Set in NZ, The Lazy Boys is a harrowing account of a group of
friends spiralling out of control during their first year at university.
Shuker's US publisher Shoemaker & Hoard describes the book as "a punch
in the stomach, a sustained cry; as harsh as Less Than Zero, as brutal as A
Clockwork Orange." Shuker discusses his novel's difficult gestation in NZ's
Herald on Sunday: "I wrote this book during a very dark time in my life,
and when it was finished, I was a very dark person ... The novel had been such a
trauma to finish that when I did so, I still remember counting the hours of
peace." A graduate of Bill Manhire's creative writing course at Victoria
University, Shuker won NZ's 2006 Glen Schaeffer Prize in Modern Letters for his
debut novel, The Method Actors.
(10 December 2006)
The case for the code
The man behind international best-seller The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown, will face
a High Court action brought by the authors of the non-fictional
work The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982). The latter's authors, Richard
Leigh (UK) and Michael Baigent (NZ), claim that Brown's fictional blockbuster is
based on their decade of research. Michael Baigent (pictured) is a prolific New
Zealand writer who has authored and co-authored numerous works. He graduated
with a BA in Psychology from Canterbury University, Christchurch.
(24 October 2005)
This case was later dismissed. Read
update
Career ready for take off
Departure Lounge, the latest novel by Auckland writer Chad Taylor, has garnered
praise abroad for its cool, noir aesthetics. The Sydney Morning Herald calls
Taylor "impressive," while the review by Washington Post senior
critic, Jonathan Yardley, is an all-out rave: "Departure Lounge is smart,
original, surprising and just about as cool as a novel can get … A lovely
piece of work that leaves one hoping more of Taylor's writing finds its way to
this side of the Pacific."
(4 May 2006)
Alternative History 101
Historian Gavin Menzies recently visited NZ to promote his controversial
bestseller 1421. One of the most contentious
theories in the book is that NZ was mapped and settled by Chinese 300 years
before the arrival of Captain Cook, and that Maori are the result of
interbreeding between these Chinese settlers and their Melanesian slaves. While
Menzies' theories have gained some ground with fellow researchers of early
Chinese settlements, such as authors Paul Chiasson and Gary Geddes, and have a
massive online following, most academics dismiss his claims as at the least
pseudoscience, at the most "a disgrace" (Michael King in the
Listener).
(27 May 2006)
Analysing the “yucky side of life”
John Crace interviews Joanna Bourke,
lecturer, historian and author of numerous academic books including the
controversial An Intimate History of Killing and her most recent
publication, Fear: A Cultural History. “Historians tend to come in two
sizes: the micro-specialists and those who prefer a broader canvas. Joanna
Bourke leaves you in no doubt where her sympathies lie. ‘I'm not one for writing
the same book over and over again,’ she says breezily. ‘Others can correct any
mistakes I've made. Life's too short for second editions.’” Bourke was born to
NZ missionary parents, raised in the Soloman Islands and Haiti, and studied at
Auckland University before moving to England.
(15 March 2005)
Words as music
Whale Rider’s US paperback release garnered further praise for author
Witi Ihimaera. “Some writers create such beautiful prose that it might be
poetry or music. Witi Ihimaera …
is one such writer.”
(5 December 2004)
Edgy heroine
Fay Weldon’s autobiography - Auto Da
Fay – featured in the New York Times’ New and Noteworthy Paperbacks
section. “Unlike many of the female characters in her dozens of breezy novels,
Weldon comes off as a no-nonsense, pragmatic, resilient heroine in her own life
story […] Although she ends her book just at the point when her career is about
to take hold, her story of a lost girl on her way to finding herself winds up
having heft as well as lift.”
(27 June 2004)
"The most influential American criminologist of his time"
Pioneering criminologist and novelist,
Norval Morris, has died in Chicago aged 80. Born in Auckland, Morris studied in
Australia, France, and England before embarking on his 30-year academic career
at the University of Chicago in 1964. As well as penning numerous acclaimed
works of non-fiction and fiction, Morris founded the Melbourne University
Criminology Department, the UN Institute in Tokyo, the Centre for Criminal
Studies in Chicago, and the world's preeminent criminology journal, Crime and
Justice: A Review of Research. According to the Guardian, "He
was an institution-builder of unmatched influence, and his ideas about
punishment have transformed the ways people think."
(9 April 2004)
Edge hero brought to life
Ernest Rutherford takes centre stage in
Irish writer Brian Cathcart's latest book,
The Fly
in the Cathedral:
How a small group of
Cambridge scientists won the race to split the atom. Rutherford is described
by Cathcart as "the battleship of physics" in what
Popular Science
calls "a fascinating story [told] superbly well."
(7 March 2004)
Comic genius
Martin Emond, internationally renowned
comic-book artist, illustrator, and tattooist, died in LA on March 19 aged 34.
Emond created the popular character Switchblade (star of NZ clothing brand
Illicit) and the acclaimed White Trash and Rolling Red Knuckles
series, the latter of which earned him a cult following in Japan. An inspiration
to his Kiwi contemporaries, Emond worked with US giants Marvel and DC Comics,
and collaborated with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles creator Kevin Eastman,
hardcore rocker Glen Danzig, and Tundra’s Gordon Rennie. He was working on an
animated version of Rolling Red Knuckles for Pirate.Net, a subsidiary of
Fox TV, when he died. Silver Bullet described him as “a prolific creator
who worked to support up and coming artists and never let success go to his
head.” see also NZ
Listener obituary
(20 March 2004)
Big read
Elizabeth Knox’s Daylight – a typically
imaginative tale involving caving, mysterious deaths, and a Resistance heroine –
makes the Australian’s list of Big Reads for 2004.
(27 December 2003)
Being Beryl Fletcher: the life of a "feminist firebrand."
NZ author, Beryl Fletcher, was a guest
speaker at the Melboune Writers Festival in August. Fletcher's latest work
- The House at Karamu - is a personal memoir, which "attempts to map
the identity shift experienced by a generation of women inspired to reinvent
themselves." Says Fletcher, "With fiction, you're a puppeteer, pulling
strings. But memoir unmasks you."
(29 August 2003)
Little Piece of Ground on a fractious edge
Award-winning NZ-born author, Elizabeth
Laird, has earned the wrath of Jewish pressure groups following the publication
of her latest children's book, A Little Piece of Ground. The story is a
fictional account of a Palestinian boy whose family's olive groves are
confiscated by Israeli settlers, and was written after Laird visited Ramallah as
part of a British Council scheme to encourage children's writing. Laird:
"This is an important story that should be told. It shows a child under
military occupation … There is already a great deal of understanding of Israel
… The voice of the Palestinian child, on the other hand, has not been
heard."
(23 August 2003)
Third Culturist Boyd nets Nabokov
Brian Boyd-edited Nabokov's
Butterflies, an exploration of Nabokov's obsession with butterflies that
posits Nabokov's scientific pursuit of lepidoptry as a way of understanding the
author more completely, hailed as third culture exemplar in Weekend
Australian's 'science reads' review. "Miscellany with a pleasing sense
of mania about it ... one of those rare books that combines great charm and
extraordinary substance, and that transforms our appreciation of the author and
all his work." Author John Fowles in The Spectator found that
"the book quivers with life like a recently caught butterfly itself."
(19 - 20 July 2003)
The Magus and his protégés
"Do creative writing
courses work? Judge for yourselves." The Guardian's literary gossip
column reports on the
findings of a recent NZ Listener poll naming the country's top 10 authors
under 40. Six of them - Catherine Chidgey, Tim Corballis, Kate Duignan, Paula
Morris, Emma Neale, and Emily Perkins - are graduates of Bill Manhire's
productive creative writing programme at Victoria University. Damien Wilkins, Chad Taylor,
Charlotte Grimshaw and Craig Marriner completed the talented ten.
(5 July 2003)
Tremain mines our past
The latest offering from award-winning
British author, Rose Tremain, finds its inspiration in mid-19th century NZ and
thwarted edge expectations: "We will not cling to familiar ways. We will
imagine ourselves reborn over there. On the acres I am buying, everything will
begin afresh." The
Colour - a tale of "bush rats and broken lives" - unfolds amidst
the harsh extremes of heat and cold of the Southern Alps' Kaniere
and Kokatahi goldfields.
(17 May 2003)
Bone people a modern classic
Keri Hulme's the bone people
featured in a Guardian poll of the Top 50 novels by women writers. The NZ Booker Prize winner
sits alongside Alice
Walker's The Color Purple in the list of "old favourites and new
heroines."
(12 May 2003)
"Sex is cheap, but domination isn't"
Former NZ university lecturer and academic, Jody Hanson, interviewed in The
Age on her newfound role as a dominatrix and writer in Melbourne. Known on
the dungeon circuit as Mistress J, Hanson conducts seminars, and has written two
books, on the art of domination. Together with Mistress Margaret, Hanson
recently established The Domina Reform School - "for good girls who'd
rather be bad."
(7 May 2003)
Method writing
Writer Philippa Boyens speaks out on her own epic quest; adapting the Lord of
the Rings trilogy for the screen. With her collaborators Walsh, Jackson
and Sinclair, Boyens battled against political misreadings, weird names and the
slippery slope to geekiness. "It drove us insane, basically," she
says.
(23 March 2003)
Bright spark
Chad Taylor's Electric
continues to receive great press from leading reviewers. Guardian:
"The hypnotic pull of Taylor's story lies in the zigzag dance of its
forlorn characters, casting a murky, uneasy sense of doom. Not one for action
fans, but a book that offers subtle rewards for connoisseurs of entropy
noir."
(25 January 2003)
Literary dairy export
Sarah-Kate Lynch has forsaken
editorship of New Zealand Woman's Weekly in favour of a career in
fiction, with a first novel Blessed Are the Cheesemakers. While Guardian
reviewer Helen Falconer finds the book "somewhat over-processed," film
company Working Title (Bridget Jones' Diary, Four Weddings and a Funeral)
wasted no time in buying the rights to what they see as cheese's answer to Chocolat.
Fondue anyone?
(11 January 2003)
Sunny praise for Chidgey
The Strength of the Sun by Lower Hutt writer Catherine Chidgey
makes LA Times Best Books list for 2002. "An exquisitely written,
curiously tantalizing book that looks something like a mystery story but is
something far more evanescent […] a beautifully crafted, often poignant
work."
(8 December 2002)
Wilkins' latest bonds with reviewer
Guardian reviewer Phil Whitaker assesses Damien Wilkins' novel, Chemistry,
a chronicle of drug addiction and family trauma set in small-town NZ.
"Wilkins is brilliant at character, and his resistance to movement for the
family members is clearly deliberate and quite possibly true to life. [...] the
writing is full of verve. Wilkins has an eye for telling detail, a great ear for
dialogue and a dark sense of humour. It is easy to understand the acclaim he has
already won in his native New Zealand."
(16 November 2002)
Booker Prize: end of an era?
Observer critics liken this year's Man Booker Prize win to that of
NZ's Keri Hulme on "that unforgettable night in the mid-80s." Yann
Martel's The Life of Pi won thanks to "a virtuoso display of
chairmanship" by Lisa Jardine. Hulme's novel, the bone people,
was similarly promoted by then chairman, Norman St John Stevas. Yet, while
Hulme's win belongs to "Booker's glorious past," The Life of Pi is called "reader
friendly and market conscious" - something which has certainly never been said of
Hulme's difficult and experimental work.
(27 October 2002)
From strength to strength
Boston Globe finds the
UV rays result in intense expression in Lower Hutt
writer Catherine Chidgey's latest novel, Strength of the Sun: "a
meticulously constructed novel of true imagination."
(9 June 2002)
Karl Popper's NZEdged legacy
Roger James in the The Guardian
ponders the centenary of the birth of one of the C20th
most original (and controversial) thinkers, philosopher Karl Popper. In an
affirmation of edge theory Popper's most influential work (a pair of
books of which the most famous is The Open Society And Its Enemies) was
written while at Canterbury University College, Christchurch, NZ, where
he spent the whole of the war taking up a lectureship after fleeing Nazi
occupation of his native Vienna (Popper was born to Jewish parents who had
converted to Christianity).
(27 April 2002)
"A work of almost perfect pitch"
CK Stead's new novel The Secret History of Modernism
reviewed inThe Age: "Stead is very clever and he's comfortable on this
ground, patrolling that sometimes misty territory between truth and invention,
between history and fiction, with admirable purpose." The Guardian
has an alternative reader-response to Stead's "infuriating, confusing, yet
ultimately provoking take on the masochism of surrendering to narrative." Link here
for Simon Upton's review of the "splendid literary stoush" between
Professor Stead and reviewer Philip Mead in the correspondence columns of The
Times Literary Supplement.
(1 April 2002)
A Russian soul
Joanna Wood's
"beautifully written" biography of "short story master"
Katherine Mansfield, Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield,
details the New Zealand-born writer's lifelong passion for everything Russian:
"She liked to wear Russian clothes, used Russian versions of her name, was
passionate about Russian music, and her literary love affairs with Leo Tolstoy,
Fyodor Dostovesky and Anton Chekhov strongly influenced her writing". Click
here for Damien Wilkins's excellent NZEDGE hero story on Mansfield.
(15 March 2002)
Nabokov's Butterflies
The Brian Boyd (University of Auckland Professor and the world's leading Nabokov
scholar) edited Nabokov's Butterflies - a collection of Vladimir Nabokov's
writings about butterflies, reviewed by Mark Ridley in The Times Literary Supplement.
(March 2002)
Weldon CBE
New Zealand-raised London-based writer Fay Weldon is now Fay Weldon, CBE.
"One feels very flattered," says Weldon, honoured for her charitable work
as well as her writing.
(30 December 2001)
Madcap Pamela bestselling biographer
New Zealand-born Pamela Stephenson, practicing psychotherapist and ex-comedian (part of the anarchic
foursome who made the
seminal and career launching comedy Not the Nine o'clock News - along with Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones), achieves remarkable success with her
biography of husband Billy Connolly. Sales in Britain and Australia alone reach
840,000.
(6 January 2002)
More than Mansfield in Bloomsbury Group
Liz Calder, the NZedged head of Bloomsbury publishing (publishers of such
literary luminaries as Michael Ondaatje, Will Self and John Irving), talks to The Guardian
about the touted blockbuster battle, book and film drawn as weapons, between
Bloomsbury's Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings: "There's no
link other than the obvious one, that they're both extraordinarily good stories.
What they're so successful at is in taking the reader into another world in a
complete fashion, in such a way that you don't want to come back: you don't want
the books to end".
(4 November 2001)
Author graced with further award
Author Patricia Grace is honoured with the 2001 Kiriyama Pacific Rim book prize
for her novel Dogside Stories. The award was established to promote
cross-cultural understanding.
(October 2001)
Irish
Ties
New
Zealander Bridget Patterson took her Grandmother's diary to Ireland - and the
story is now part of a BBC TV series
Blood Ties.
Archived story
(28 September 2001)
Booker long-list Graced
Kiwi author Patrica Grace's Dogside Story about an East Coast Maori
township makes the long-list for the much-vaunted Booker Prize, shunting
aside Salman to join such luminaries as Beryl Bainbridge, Peter Carey, Ian
McEwan, V.S. Naipaul and Nadine Gordimer in the literary rabbit-chase
round the track. Bets open.
(16 August 2001)
Brits take to New Girl
Emily Perkins's The New Girl: "The atmosphere of summer, youth and
restlessness in a social backwater is strong, as is the projection of Miranda's
intriguing personality and its effect on Julia, her brightest pupil. Perkins's
potential is clearly considerable."
(15 July 2001)
Scholar honoured
New Zealand novelist, poet, critic and scholar Professor Karl Stead awarded an honorary
doctorate by Bristol University.
(20 June 2001)
Memory example
Memory, acclaimed New Zealand author Margaret Mahy's teen-fic book on Alzheimer's,
care, and healing is part of a trend towards more complex depictions of older
people in fiction written for children and young adults.
(26 June 2001)
Edgey Egger
"By the time the article appeared
in mid-February, Dave had decamped from
New York to New Zealand. The international dateline, like the hostile
astrological signs in Romeo and Juliet, meant he didn't see the proof until too
late; just how star-crossed can two buddies be?"
(11 March 2001)
Writer's birthday
The 13 of March is the birthday of novelist, Sir Hugh Walpole, born in
Auckland in 1884.
(13 March 2001)
The authors' luck
The selection of New Zealand novels Baby No-Eyes, The Vintner's Luck
and Believers to the Bright Coast on the short list of six for the new
A$40 000 Tasmanian Pacific Region Prize for best novel "shows the country's
strength of literary creativity" says judge Professor Brian Matthews.
(12 January 2001)
Still sailing
Ian Tew's soon to be published In Grandfather's Wake includes an account of
finding Grandpa Graham's old yacht "in full commission" in New
Zealand.
(26 January 2001)
Land ahoy!
Karne Hesse's teen novel Stowaway chronicles the life of Nick Young,
a stowaway on Cook's ship and the first of the crew to spot Aotearoa
(17 December 2000)
Immaculate Duffy
New Zealander Stella Duffy, creator of
lesbian crime-fighter Saz Martin, tackles God and redemption in her latest Immaculate
Conception: "I think it's ground-breaking to write about miracles as if
they're real. It's not very post-modern of me, but it's very post-millennial".
(16 December 2000)
Fearless storyteller
"At 12 she was carrying a gun as big as she was, fighting for freedom in
the Hungarian Revolution." Later, Anna Porter made it to New Zealand as
a refugee. Now she runs a major Canadian publishing house, writing mystery
stories and an autobiography on the side.
(6 November 2000)
Well done
NZ-bred Fay Weldon needn't have the Rhode Island Blues over reviews
for her latest book: "she writes thoroughly modern fables that throw light
and cast doubt on the meaning and wisdom of contemporary pieties."
(21 September 2000)
Who is that famous writer
living next door?
Michael King spoke
about his authorised and hugely successful biography of Janet Frame at the
Melbourne Writers’ Festival. Frame a recluse: she writes under her
own name, but lives under a pseudonym. Other Kiwi writers at the festival
included CK Stead and Alan Duff.
(5 September 2000)
Framing
the truth
Wrestling with the Angel, Michael King's
bio of Janet
Frame, has generated acclaim, column inches and voluminous sales in New Zealand and overseas. Stephanie Dowrick
describes Frame as "(one of) the two great 20th-century writers in English
from our region, and among the top dozen writers in English from any country".
(25 September 2000)
Stories from the Diaspora
“I write to give voice to
those who are otherwise lost or forgotten completely in Pacific literature:
young girls and women.” Pasifika Press in New Zealand snapped up Sia Figiel’s
where
we once belonged which went on to win the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize.
(July 2000)
Sun, sea, sand and ... guns: Palm Beach Hotel (Gaza)
New Zealand journalist Phil Reeveson, writing for the Independent, visits
the chaotic and 'screwed up' Gaza Strip - the conflicted strip of land between
Egypt and Israel. Including a visit to a Jewish luxury hotel, mini-golf tennis
courts et al, whose aim is not to make profit: "It is an ideological
hotel" the owner explains.
(8 July 2000)
Looking Down: Fleur Adcock reaps poetic insight from the fringe
"Strangers are good for us, they help us see ourselves in unfamiliar ways.
They take slightly different routes across our wearisomely footslogged home
turf." [Adcock's] poetry is acute, intelligent, fastidious,
sceptical, often disturbingly funny. It takes a kind of aerial view of mankind
and his desperate foibles.
(16 May 2000)
The seduction of sand: TimeOut falls for Long, Hot Summer
[Barbara Anderson's] "Long Hot Summer is a joy to read. Someone
stops breathing in the final scene and the reader holds their breath as well.
Like the rest of this cleverly patterned novel, it is unsentimental but moving,
the comic comeuppance keenly anticipated and thoroughly deserved. Anderson
deserves to be cherished too."
(May 2000)
Long Hot Summer puts the heat on readers
Kiwi Barbara Anderson's latest novel gets praise in Times review,
"a fine and sharp intelligence infuses Anderson's characters and dialogue
... Long Hot Summer demands attention from the reader, but it is worth
it".
(20 April 2000)
New Zealand scholar suggests sceptical slant on Sikh story
Kiwi scholar Hew Mcleod puts claims
made in Patwant Singh's The Sikhs to the test of historical veracity - a
task that has made him persona non grata with many members of the world's fifth
largest religion.
(29 April 2000)
Get it right mate - Theroux undone by Stead detective work
"This week the London Review of Books prints a
long investigation by the poet CK Stead into a lunch party at Naipaul's house
attended by Theroux and a New Zealand couple Stead happens to know."
(22 April 2000)
A sting in the tale
"When the New York Times says of your second novel that it
"constructs a sturdy web of silken prose", you might reasonably
conclude that, as a novelist, you have arrived. When into the bargain, that novel
is on the shelf marked Crime/Thriller, you might be entitled to punch the air in
triumph. Frankly it’s hard to imagine New Zealand reared Julie Parsons doing
either".
(15 April 2000)
Nabokov's Pale Fire still smoulders
38 years later, the mystery continues to intrigue... Auckland University's
Professor Brian Boyd attempts to solve the enigma.
(14 March 2000)
Ghost Story
Commentary on a commentary: New York Times Book Review of Auckland
University scholar Brian Boyd's attempt to unravel the riddles embedded in
Vladimir Nabokov's classic story Pale Fire.
(5 March 2000)
"I Love Dick"
Interview with Kiwi writer and avant-garde filmmaker
Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick (the spare-no-prisoners tell-all that
scandalised the Soho Intelligentsia) talks about anorexia, romance, and faking
it.
(3 March 2000)
"Fresh Talent" Chad Taylor sends sophisticated shivers in
Shirker
"With a tight and observant style, Taylor has weaved an engaging tale
reminiscent of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and with
peripheral detail as obsessive as Easton Ellis's American Psycho.
He may touch upon lofty notions of mortality - but it is his cinematic
sense of location and narration that whisks us towards the novel's
inventive finale."
(March 2000)
Grimshaw deals with Guilt
"New Zealand crime writer Charlotte Grimshaw creates simply drawn urban
landscapes, whose noirish, unsettling atmosphere is powerfully caught"
(22 Jan 2000)
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Laureate discovers
Wellington poet Bill Manhire is profiled in The Age as a man who quite
accidentally fell upon letters, who secretly wrote at school until he read Walt
Whitman in his final year at school. Manhire is in Australia this week at the
Adelaide Readers' and Writers' Week. New Zealand's first poet laureate and
director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria
University, Wellington, Manhire says he will just sit down and scribble words
for several pages. "Suddenly you just bump into this very strange phrase
that you couldn't have anticipated and that is charged with all sorts of
resonance, so you chase on after what that phrase suggests and suddenly you are
in the territory of what you don't know; that unmapped space," he
says.
(23 February 2008)
Ongoing impact
A Dutch academic has published a book examining the impact Once
Were Warriors has had on NZ culture. Once Were Warriors The
Aftermath: The Controversy of Once Were Warriors in Aotearoa New Zealand is
written by University of Amsterdam media studies lecturer Emiel Martens. In it,
Martens discusses the widespread controversy created by both Alan Duff's book
and Lee Tamahori's film in relation to wider postcolonial issues such as racial
stereotypes, cultural politics, ethnic relations, indigenous media and Maori
identity. Said Martens in Wellington's Dominion Post, "I regard [Once
Were Warriors] as a very important movie, well, actually the most important
movie in the history of New Zealand cinema, and, together with the novel, the
most important cultural expression in New Zealand ever, because of this
impact."
(22 October 2007)
Fashion writer swaps stilettos for saddles
Well-known NZ fashion reporter Stacy
Gregg has turned her hand to writing children's fiction. Gregg, a keen horse
rider as a young woman, noticed a gap in the market for well written pony
stories for the 8 to 12 age group. "There were a couple of modern [pony
centric] series that I found truly awful," she said in a NZ Herald
interview. "The writers seemed to know nothing about horses and they didn't
have any genuine passion for them. And I found the only really good horse books
for girls like me were written way back in the '50s. So I knew there was room in
the genre." Harper Collins UK has already published the first two books in
Gregg's 8-book Pony Club Secrets series, which was launched in the Commonwealth
market this month. Gregg has also sold the German rights to the series and is
fielding calls regarding film rights. Her first two books - Mystic
and the Midnight Ride and Blaze and the Dark Rider - are
currently numbers 12 and 15 on the children's top 30 books chart at WHSmith, a
prominent UK bookseller chain.
(6 October 2007)
"Imaginative daring" wins literary gong
New Zealander Kirsty Gunn has won the Sundial Scottish Arts
Council Book of the Year award, one of Scotland's most esteemed literary prizes.
Gunn, a professor of creative writing at Dundee University, received the honour
for her acclaimed novella The Boy And The Sea. She was presented with a cheque
for £25,000 by Sundial Properties managing director William Gray Muir at the
Edinburgh International Book Festival. "I am delighted that the award has
gone to Kirsty Gunn," he said. "The Boy And The Sea is a truly
remarkable book, with its poignant story drifting effortlessly between poetry
and prose." A spokesman for the judging panel described Gunn's book as
"a novella of consummate subtlety, imaginative daring and emotional
intensity". Kirsty Gunn is a graduate of the Victoria University of
Wellington.
(18 August 2007)
Backstage essential
NZ-born osteopath to the stars Garry
Trainer has released a new book, Back Chat, with health writer Tania
Alexander. Back Chat examines 40 individual case studies of back pain,
identifying common causes and offering advice on how best to avoid them.
Regarded as a pioneer in his field, Trainer has worked in the UK for the past 25
years and runs a successful clinic in London's Primrose Hill. His clients, past
and present, include Brad Pitt, Paul and Linda McCartney, George Michael, Emma
Thompson and Paul Simon. Despite his star clientele, Trainer remains grounded by
his patients' common physiology. "It doesn't matter if you're black, white
or green, how rich you are or how poor you are. We have all got the same muscles
and nerves and the same discs. Anyone that moves is prone to back pain", he
said in a recent interview with NZ's Sunday Star Times. Trainer's next
high-profile job is working on the film version of ABBA musical Mama Mia,
starring Pierce Brosnan and Meryl Streep.
(10 June 2007)
Pub weirdo finds his voice
South London-based NZ writer Paul
Ewen has released his first book, London
Pub Reviews. Ewen set up his own publishing company, Shoes With Rockets, to
make sure the collection of humorous fictional reviews of real pubs made it to
the shelves. It is now being sold at the Tate Britain and numerous independent
book shops around the city, as well as on Amazon. "I first got to know my
way around London by using a pub guide and by visiting the best pubs in
different areas," says Ewen. "Because I was using it so much, I sort
of got into the vernacular of the pub guide, and when I started writing in these
pubs I was visiting, the pub reviews became a kind of scaffolding for my
stories." According to fellow author Tom McCarthy, Ewen has "given
voice to that perennial figure who haunts the margins of all our lives: the pub
weirdo", while author and editor Toby Litt hails Ewen as "the funniest
new writer I have read in years".
(23 May 2007)
Short and sweet
Auckland writer Charlotte
Grimshaw has been nominated for the world's richest prize for collected
short stories, the £35,000 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
Grimshaw joins 32 authors on the Irish event's longlist, including heavyweights
Alice Munro and David Malouf. She describes Opportunity, her first ever
collection, as "not just a collection of short stories that I've thrown
together - all the stories are interconnected. The characters recur and reappear
and it has an extra layer in a way because one of the characters is the author
of all the stories." Grimshaw, 40, won last year's Katherine Mansfield
Award for short fiction and is the author of three acclaimed novels:
Provocation, Guilt and Foreign City. The Frank O'Connor shortlist will be
announced in July, and the winner declared at Cork's Frank O'Connor
International Short Story Festival in September.
(30 April 2007)
Piano plagiarism causes aesthetic dilemma
Denis Dutton, Canterbury University professor and founding editor of Arts
& Letters Daily, writes about a "scandal unparalleled in the annals
of classical music" for the New York Times. Dutton's piece explores the
implications for instrumental criticism caused by the recently-outed piano
plagiarist, Joyce Hatto. Hatto was widely acclaimed for her late-life recordings
before it was revealed that she had been passing off the work of upcoming
pianists as her own. "I'm personally convinced that there is an authentic,
objective maturity that I can hear in the later recordings of Rubinstein,"
writes Dutton. "This special quality of his is actually in the music, and
is not just subjectively derived from seeing the wrinkles in the old man's face.
But the Joyce Hatto episode shows that our expectations, our knowledge of a back
story, can subtly, or perhaps even crudely, affect our aesthetic response."
Dutton's piece was re-published on leading thinkers' website, the Edge
Foundation.
(20 March 2007)
Cash versus creativity
Auckland-raised author Fay Weldon mourns the death of literary creativity in a
passionate column for The Times. "Time was when popularity was the mark of
artistic failure," she complains, "These days it's the other way
round. 'Bestseller' betokens artistic success ... A 'good' book is, by
inference, an easy book. A 'good' book is one that sells." Weldon blames
the dominance of marketing over editorial departments, the rise of the sequel
and prequel, and the rumoured control large bookselling chains have over
publishing houses for what she terms the "tyranny of the bestsellers."
A version of the same article also appeared in the Royal Society of Literature
Review.
(10 February 2007)
Linda Niccol notches British Screenplay Prize
Wellington writer Linda Niccol has won the prestigious British
Short Screenplay Prize ahead of 2000+ other screenwriters. Her script for
The Handkerchief was judged best script by a panel that included Kenneth
Branagh, Alan Parker and Nik Powell. As part of the prize, The Handkerchief will
be made into a 15-minute film in 07, with a budget of up to US$300K. Linda
Niccol’s 2005 collection of stories The Geometry of Desire was described by NZ
Listener as “fearless…rueful, razory humour… dialogue that’s edgy,
injurious, points-scoring…Niccol takes risks with style, allusion and
structure.” Film runs deep on Rosetta Rd as brother and director Andrew is the
writer of Lord of War, Nicole, Gattaca and the seminal Truman Show.
(15 December 2006)
Million dollar baby
An entrepreneurial NZ website is selling words for SUS1 each in a bid to create
a one-of-a-kind multi-authored novel. The brains behind anovelmillion.com
is Australian born Aditya Kesarcodi-Watson. "Anybody is capable of buying
words for the website, and they will be credited as an author," he
explains. "People choose their words and email them to me, and I upload
them to my website." Users can either contribute to the million word novel
or a shorter million character story.
(6 July 2006)
A place in the sun
Granta editor, Ian Jack, writes about Katherine Mansfield's convalescence in
Menton for the Guardian. Menton, a resort town on the French Riviera, was
renowned for its curative sea air in the early 20th century. Suffering from
tuberculosis, Mansfield stayed at the Villa Isola Bella from 1919 to 1921, dying
shortly afterwards in Switzerland aged 34. Menton has a street named in the NZ
writer's honour - Rue Katherine Mansfield - and the Villa Isola Bella is home to
two bronze plaques commemorating its famous former resident. Writes Jack,
"[Mansfield] wrote some of the greatest short stories of the last century:
Bliss, The Garden Party, The Man Without a Temperament. To have written just one
of them, I thought on the platform at Menton Garavan: that would be
something."
(10 June 2006)
Itinerant observer
Groundbreaking NZ anthropologist, Michael Jackson, currently Visiting Professor
in World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, has released his memoirs. Titled The
Accidental Anthropologist, the book details his nomadic lifestyle since
leaving NZ as a young man, particularly his time spent with the Kuranko people
of Sierra Leone and the Aboriginal tribes of Australia. "I simply want
people to see for themselves that the life of every Sierra Leonean is as
complicated, as peculiar, as purposeful and as rich as the lives of New
Zealanders and North Americans," he says in an interview with the NZ
Listener. "And you can only do that by having recourse to a lot of
particulars that can't be assimilated into some kind of generalisation about
culture or society or community or history - these big categorical boxes we dump
everything into." As well as numerous anthropological and academic works,
Jackson is the author of two novels and six volumes of poetry. He was awarded an
honorary doctorate in literature by Victoria University of Wellington in June
this year.
(1 July 2006)
Grimm scholar's big find
Renowned NZ Germanist, Professor Alan Kirkness, who retired from Auckland
University in 2004, played a key role in the discovery of nine new books by
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. The hand-annotated
volumes of the German dictionary, begun but never completed by the Brothers
Grimm, have been missing since WW2. Kirkness and his German colleague Berthold
Friemel have been writing letters and emails to Eastern European libraries since
the 1970s. The works finally turned up in Cracow, Poland, where Kirkness has
long expected to find them. "It's not an earth-shattering discovery,"
he says in the NZ Listener. "But in Grimm research it would have to be the
most significant find in half a century or more. It is more unknown material
that has come directly from the pen of these two leading German
intellectuals."
(13 May 2006)
New take on an extraordinary figure
Sir
Edmund Hillary: An Extraordinary Life, a new authorized biography by art
curator Alexa Johnston, has been well received both at home and abroad.
According to Johnston, speaking in the Sunday Star Times, the book grew out of
an exhibition celebrating Hillary's life which she curated in 2003. "I
wanted [the book] to have a strong visual component, encapsulating much of what
had been shown at the museum … There are other books about Ed, of course,
including his own, but I think I've come up with a fresh approach." The
Baltimore Sun recommends the book as essential winter reading: "Sir
Edmund's life has been more than just conquering the world's highest
mountain."
(24 November 2005)
Tribute to a torchbearer
Chicago-based writer, Cheryl Kent, has published a book on internationally
renowned Wellington born architect David Hovey entitled The Nature of Dwellings: The
Architecture of David Hovey. Amazon’s editorial notes describe Hovey as “the
torchbearer for modern residential design … Hovey picks up where Frank Lloyd
Wright left off, forging ahead with explorations of simple materials,
rectilinear geometries, and structural innovation all in the service of
free-flowing floor plans that merge indoor and outdoor into a cohesive whole.”
(September 2005)
From strength to strength
Catherine Chidgey’s second novel, The
Strength of the Sun, is rapturously received in the New York Times.
“It's difficult to articulate exactly what gives this novel its unassuming power
… In combination, the disparate elements of Chidgey's novel create a dense and
multifaceted whole, an arresting portrait of a world where the past never
disappears entirely, but keeps returning to us - however imperfectly - in
countless small and unexpected ways.”
(19 June 2005)
Writer in residence
Wellington-based British
author Neil Cross, has made the 2004 Man Booker Prize long-list with his fourth
novel, "Always the Sun". The story tells of a father’s attempts to prevent his son
from being bullied. In an interview with
Pulp.Net, Cross
identifies Wellington’s Unity Books as his favourite bookshop in the world,
calling it “small and supernaturally well-stocked.”
(26 August 2004)
Anderson wins reviewer's heart
Barbara Anderson's latest novel,
Change of Heart, warmly reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement:
"With the authority of experience Anderson captures perfectly the foibles,
prejudices, anxieties and joys of the kind of septuagenarian who announces, 'We
can keep cruises for when we're old' ... Anderson's greatest skill, however, is
the creation of quirky characters ... these are not stereotypes but people whose
words and actions are rooted in their personalities and backgrounds."
(11 June 2004)
Giant kauri tragically felled
NZ mourns the loss of its preeminent cultural historian, Michael King. The
author of 34 books - including the groundbreaking autobiographical work Being
Pakeha and acclaimed biographies of Dame Whina Cooper, Hone Tuwhare, and
Janet Frame - King was honoured last year as a "giant kauri" of NZ literature at
the inaugural Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement, and named New
Zealander of the Year by the New Zealand Herald. His Penguin
History of New Zealand has sold a staggering 70,000 copies since its
publication last October, highlighting the great esteem in which he is held by
everyday New Zealanders as a chronicler of their times. King was killed
instantly in a car crash on March 30 - along with his wife Maria Jungowska -
just weeks after announcing his full recovery from throat cancer.
(31 March 2004)
From sea to sky
Witi Ihimaera – “debonair 59-year-old,
multi-award winning author, playwright, librettist, anthologist, university
lecturer, former foreign diplomat and Maori activist” – interviewed in the
Age about his latest novel, Sky Dancer. Following on the successful
formula of Whale Rider, the book weaves Maori myth into a modern-day
tale, with a spirited young girl as its heroine. The story – first scrawled in
pencil on his bedroom wall as a twelve-year-old – tells of an epic battle
between the birds of land and sea. A film version of Sky Dancer is
already in the works.
(8 January 2004)
Epilogue written to a life of words
NZ lost one of its edgiest inhabitants with the death of Janet Frame from
acute myeloid leukemia on January 29. Frame, the author of 11 novels, 5 collections
of short stories, a poetry collection, and an acclaimed 3-part autobiography,
was NZ's leading contender for a Nobel Prize for literature, twice nominated.
She was regarded as the country's
greatest living author, if not of all time. The world's press has expressed
sorrow at Frame's passing, with tributes in the
Times,
Scotsman,
New York Times,
New Zealand Herald,
Hindustan Times, International Herald
Tribune and
Guardian, and obituaries by compatriots Michael King in the
Sydney
Morning Herald and
Guardian, and CK Stead and Fleur Adcock in the
Independent. Fellow author
Witi Ihimaera likened Frame's death to losing a beloved grandmother: "She
had been so much a part of all our lives. She's been an icon." "Janet
Frame has made an extraordinary contribution to both New Zealand and the world's
literary canon," said Creative New Zealand head,
Elizabeth Kerr. "Reading Janet Frame's novels and poetry is to take a
journey into what it means to be human. Her death is a sad loss for writers and
readers throughout the world, and for New Zealanders."
(2003)
Edge of the alphabet conjurer has cancer
SMH pays tribute to
Janet Frame - "one of New Zealand's most celebrated and enigmatic writers" - who
recently revealed she is terminally ill with cancer. Frame's biographer Michael
King (Wrestling with the Angel) was quoted in the article: "There
will be Janet the writer observing it all and being interested in it until the
last possible moment ... If you maintain that interest, it pushes the demons
into the background." He likened Frame's stature in NZ to that of Sir Edmund
Hillary: "The country will feel the same kind of bereavement when we no longer
have them."
(2003)
Salty tales for stay-at-homes
Voyaging the Pacific, Miles Horden’s account of sailing between his
native NZ and Patagonia, reviewed in Japan’s Daily Yomiuri. “Miles
Horden's book … is a cracking good yarn, mainly because he is such a solid
writer; modest, knowledgeable and subtle without making a big thing out of those
qualities - in contrast to, say, Bruce Chatwin. There is a huge amount of
interesting stuff compressed within these pages, about South Pacific and South
American culture, about maritime etiquette and lore, and most of all about the
moods of the sea and the effect they have on the solitary sailor … This is a
book to be savoured slowly, and only if you don't mind being made to feel a
boring and unadventurous stay-at-home.”
(19 October 2003)
Slow burner
Annamarie Jagose’s Slow Water – the tale of a gradual unravelling of
English class systems and sexual identities on a voyage to colonial NZ - praised in the SMH.
“The book has a wide emotional range. It is also written in unpragmatically
ornate prose. At times, Jagose's prose is exacting; at other times, delightful.
But it's a slow trip. Jagose wants to communicate a lot more than the facts of
the matter. And that takes time.”
(7 June 2003)
People together: NZ re-imagined
CBC critic, Eleanor Watchel, travelled
through NZ to interview some of NZ's literary animals in their natural
habitats. The Writers & Company radio special celebrated a literary
landscape that included
authors Patricia Grace, Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Knox, Gregory O'Brien, Witi
Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, Alan Duff and Albert Wendt. "New Zealand’s writers
embrace their unique heritage in original work that reflects the modern
complexities of life in the South Pacific."
(11 May - 1 June 2003)
New Romantics
Young urban women in NZ and Australia
are the target market for a recently re-vamped Mills & Boon series.
Publisher Harlequin hopes to snare Sex & The City fans rather than those of
Barbara Cartland. Social commentator Sandy Burgham, has her doubts: "There
has been this whole explosion of 'chick lit,' but the difference between that
and Mills and Boon is that chick lit is about the chick, not 'I'm in love with a
sexy man.'"
(14 May 2003)
The Book of Fame (and fortune) for Lloyd Jones
Lloyd Jones' The Book of Fame has won the $40,000 biennial Tasmania
Pacific Fiction Prize, Australia's most lucrative literary award. The Book of
Fame is a poetic national myth-making account of the 1905 All
Black tour of Europe. "It’s an important award because it presents
fantastic opportunities to cross-pollinate our literature with that of our
neighbouring countries.” Purchase The
Book of Fame in the NZEdge shop. The theatrical adaptation
by Carl Dixon opens at
Wellington's Downstage Theatre on 9th May and film rights to the story have been optioned.
(30 March 2003)
Taylor electrifies critics
NZ writer Chad Taylor impresses international critics with his new noir novel, Electric.
Pulp: "Dark, intense, fast-paced, and perceptive, both noir literary
thriller and pulp crime fiction […] Cool, surreal and sexy - make it the first
book you read in 2003." GQ: "Hums with energy […] an
inventive and intelligent thriller." Observer:
"The plot seems to unfold in another world where reality is shifting and
elusive. Taylor's impressively laconic prose style is enough to maintain the
tension of the narrative right up to the end."
(January 2003)
Giving voice to the past
Lynda Chanwai-Earle’s challenging
one-woman play about growing up Chinese in NZ – Ka Shue (‘Letters Home’)
– earned her a major write-up in Hawaii’s Star Bulletin. Described as a “fascinating
look at a relatively unknown chapter in the history of overseas Chinese … much
of it of it taken from the experiences of her great-grandmother and down through
the female lineage to herself,” Ka Shue deals with “poll tax
descendents,” mixed-marriages, and cultural collision. In 1994 Chanwai-Earle
wrote an acclaimed collection of poetry entitled Honeypants, drawn from
her experiences with NZ gang culture. She was then invited to take creative
writing courses in women’s prisons throughout the country, as well as work with
male and youth offenders.
(23 January 2003)
Good clean ball
"Small but perfectly
formed." Lloyd Jones' The Book of Fame included in SMH's
tribute to the short novel, or novella. Jones joins the likes of Michael
Ondaatje and Jeanette Winterson as one who achieves that "sustained burst
of genius, an outburst of passion, a gift, a one-off in a writer's career."
(28 December 2002)
Moving biography as an art form
Nola Farman reviews Roger Horrocks' Len Lye biography for Art Monthly
Australia, calling it "the revelation of yet another brilliant and
creative New Zealand moment." The biography is Horrocks' tribute to an
artist he feels has been unjustly overlooked, a man who remains "an
exemplar of energy and integrity for fellow artists." Farman is as full of
praise for the biographer as she is for the revolutionary work of Lye himself:
"The book is written with integrity by a researcher who minimizes his voice
so that Lye's love of life, his speed and the pattern of his associative
thoughts are revealed."
(October 2002)
Reforging public perceptions
James Belich's history of C20th NZ, Paradise Reforged, applauded in lengthy TLS article.
Reviewer Jane Samson: "It is refreshing to have a personal vision of
the country's history from an astounding scholar who writes with lucidity and
wit. Speaking of 'islands of difference' rather than a unified people, Belich is
at his best when dealing with the implications of diversity for [NZ's] national
identity."
(6 September 2002)
Making myths
Lower-Hutt author Lloyd Jones gives the Aussies something heavier than Pavlova to think about:
"Now and then someone will write a book in the smaller country that demands
the bigger country sit up and pay attention […] in this starkly beautiful book
[The Book of Fame -
about the 1905 All Black's tour of Britain] he tackles the origin of myth,
the creation and nature of man-made beauty, and the sense of self New Zealanders
have both as individuals and as a nation.
(10 June 2002)
Where is New Zealand again?
Doing
the Billie's Kiss PR, Elizabeth
Knox pauses and reflects on the exotic settings for her books with a wry comment on
her cultural identity:"I know I'm a New Zealand writer, but I'm not writing about
New Zealand, and that in itself is very New Zealand. We just have this culture
that tells you who you are before you've grown into yourself, and that's kind of
repulsive for artists. So some of us run away, physically or mentally.'' Place that on
the New Zealand literary map.
(June 2002)
Stephenson wins UK Book of the Year
Award
Not the Nine O Clock News comedian turned psychotherapist turned
biographer, NZ-Edged Pamela Stephenson wins the book of the year prize at the
British Book Awards for her "frank and often harrowing" account of
husband Billy Connolly's life. Shrugging off Lit heavyweights Ian McEwan, Beryl Bainbridge and Jonathan
Franzen in the process . "The award doesn't, of course, just belong to the author, it very
much belongs to the subject especially if you want
to stay married to him."
(6 March 2002)
From NZ with love
"Spunky New Zealander" Mary Hobbs, editor of NZ
Outside, and her mountain guide husband Charlie, use their own money to put
together a book from their fellow countrymen to New Yorkers rocked by
the events of Sept 11. Entitled Letters to New York and America from New
Zealand with Love, the book "builds on human spirit and tries to bring
the world a little closer together". Homage from the fringe.
(13 February 2002)
"for you to see
our world the right
way round."
Allen Curnow,
one of New Zealand's great 20th-century writers and poets, has died in
Auckland. Daily
Telegraph<
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