World-changing New Zealanders
Featuring 40+ definitive short biographies of New Zealanders who have changed or benefitted the world in some way. Working from New Zealand and internationally, these scientists, artists, designers, inventors, warriors, and adventurers are inspiration for achievement. Please enjoy and be motivated.
Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield revolutionised the English short story. Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality…
Janet Frame
Mixing words with the skill of a warrior handling a taiaha, Janet Frame made a pre-eminent contribution to international literature. She came from the peripheries of art and society, yet her fictional explorations have reconfigured the world…
Colin McCahon
Colin McCahon is the region's most revered artist. He reconceived Aotearoa as the land of the long black shadow. Squinting into the hard sun, McCahon saw, "something logical, orderly and beautiful belonging to the land and not yet its people”…
Robert Burchfield
Dr Robert Burchfield was a world-renowned scholar. Hailed by the Chicago Tribune as “the greatest living lexicographer”, he played a crucial role in the study of the sources and development of the English language...
Frances Alda
Born in Christchurch in 1879, Dame Frances Alda triumphed at the New York Metropolitan Opera. A proud New Zealander and recorder of traditional Maori songs, she was famous across America as an opera star…
Tex Morton
Tex Morton lived a life of breath-taking achievement, attaining mastery, fortune and international fame as a recording star, stage artist, circus entrepreneur, Hollywood screen actor and world authority in hypnotherapy...
Peter Jackson
NZEDGE presents a personal account of the Peter Jackson story by filmmaker Costa Botes - an idiosyncratic case study of innovation, focus and energy from the edge that transformed the global film industry…
James Keir Baxter
As well as being one New Zealand's foremost poets, JK Baxter was a social activist, alcoholic derelict, dogmatic catholic, randy libertine, spiritually brash showman, whose reputation has diminished little since his death...
