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Whether it's the animals or aliens, the witches, zany pirate grandmothers or jam-making dad that they remember, no New Zealand childhood is complete without Margaret Mahy's magical books and weird, whacky, colourful characters.
Make that anywhere. The multi-award-winning author, who was first published and praised in the United States over 30 years ago, is widely read internationally with her books translated into 15 languages. She has won literary prizes in the UK, Italy and the Netherlands.
Just last week she won New Zealand's premier award for children's literature for the sixth time -- an accomplishment which no other writer has come close to.
Mahy, 66, won her sixth Esther Glen medal for her young adult novel titled "24 hours", more than 30 years after she won it for the first time with her picture book "A Lion in the Meadow".
The medal is awarded to the author (a citizen or resident of New Zealand) of the most distinguished contribution to literature for children.
What sets her writing apart from many local children's writers is that until recently she avoided New Zealand references or settings that are commonly favoured here these days.
Among her 120 or so titles, including school journals, stories for toddlers and young adult novels, Mahy's fictional world is the realm of fantasy and adventure but one where her witches, dragons, pirates and millionaires engage with the ordinary world, says the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature.
Her inventive, colourful language and rhyme captivate audiences young and old. Mahy describes impossible scenarios in a matter-of-fact tone, parodies literary conventions, and satirises human foibles.
Her virtuosity with language is such that the English poet James Fenton, advocate of the new recklessness in poetry, rose to applaud her poem Bubble Trouble when she recited it during Writers and Readers week in Wellington in Graham Beattie, managing director of children's publishers Ashton Scholastic which publishes one Mahy title 'Aliens in the Family', told current affairs magazine North and South he believed she was the greatest New Zealand writer, including writers of adult books.
"I truly think she is quite astonishing. She is more widely published than any other New Zealand author. "Long after Katherine Mansfield's books have ceased to be in print, I predict we'll still have Mahy," he said.
Raised in the small east coast town of Whakatane on the North Island as the eldest of five children, Mahy's parents infused their children's lives with their own love of language and literature. Her mother was a school teacher and her father, a bridge builder and an avid storyteller.
While considered academically 'slow' at primary school, seven-year-old Mahy began publishing her first stories in the local newspaper's children's page.
She did an arts degree at Auckland and Christchurch Universities then worked as a children's librarian whilst raising two daughters on her own and writing stories and poems in her spare time.
Her work was initially rejected by commercial publishers in New Zealand, who were concentrating on explicitly New Zealand books for the local market, although many pieces were accepted for publication in the national school journal.
Then in 1968 an American editor, Sarah Chockla Gross, discovered a "A Lion in the Meadow" and in 1969 Franklin Watts in the United States published five Mahy stories as picture books, launching her international career.
Watts went on to publish more stories, and by the mid-1970s Mahy had added junior fiction to her repertoire. By the early 1980s she was writing adolescent novels, at least one of which (Memory, 1987) could have been marketed for adults.
She has adapted some of her work for television and has said she can't imagine ever retiring from writing. Mahy lives near Christchurch but spends a good deal of time touring New Zealand and abroad visiting schools and festivals, reading and discussing her work and responding asssiduously to the copious letters, faxes and emails she receives from fans. Her public appearances have earned her a reputation as being as magical as some of her characters -- audiences now expect her to turn up in a green or rainbow-coloured wig, or dressed as a penguin, possum or witch.
And this literary grandmother recently became a "Tattooed Lady", as one newspaper dubbed her, when she had a small skull tattooed on her right shoulder.
It was research, she explained, for her recent award winner "24 Hours" -- the story of 17-year-old Ellis and how his life's ambitions fall into place in a day. She has been described as a feminist writer but Mahy herself eschews such labels. Her stories, she says spring from a single image which she connects with other current images or memories.
"When I have an idea properly established I think of it all the time ... driving, gardening, shopping. "Sometimes the story becomes so interesting to me that real life becomes rather shadowy for a while," says Mahy. "In effect I have to abandon my own life to let the life of the story take over."
