New Zealand-born scholar of Japanese history and martial arts Alexander Bennett has joined forces with fellow kendo practitioner, Shigeru Ohta, to write the English version of World War II kamikaze pilot Kazuo Odachi’s memoir,…
“What does it take to decide to up sticks and live abroad? More than just a name, although I confess I liked the idea of living on the Avenue Katherine Mansfield – named in…
Passages from a book of Katherine Mansfield’s letters published in 1918 helped a condemned British operative survive her death watch in the German concentration camp Ravensbrück. Odette Sansom, the most highly decorated spy of the…
Following a glowing review on Washington Post-owned online magazine, Slate, Wellington author Elizabeth Knox, 60, closed a deal for American and Canadian publication with Viking Penguin for her novel, The Absolute Book. “Every once in…
The influence of Jane Austen on Hairy Maclary From Donaldson’s Dairy may not be immediately apparent, but it’s there. At least that’s what New Zealander Lynley Dodd said at the opening of the The…
“One December night in 1955, a 20-year-old Irish immigrant named Albert Black, wearing heavy boots to make his hanging snap, shuffled to the gallows of a dark prison in Auckland. He’d stabbed and killed…
Napier-born Lloyd Spencer Davis is an award-winning scientist with many Antarctic field seasons behind him, Sara Wheeler writes for The Wall Street Journal. Wheeler reviews Davis’ new book, A Polar Affair: Antarctica’s Forgotten Hero…
Singapore-based New Zealander Linda Collins wrote Loss Adjustment, about the suicide of her 17-year-old daughter, as part of a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at the prestigious International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML)…
She blows in like a song carried on a powerful current: a wild-haired woman, larger than life, carrying a tall carved stick. She loses things in that hair, she says; finds pens in there…
“Cynthia, the simpering, scheming, covetous emotional sinkhole of New Zealander Annaleese Jochems’ assured debut novel, Baby, is alive and squirming; a memorable addition to the growing coterie of unapologetic antiheroines (dis)gracing the pages of…
New Zealand-born Dubai-based radio presenter and author Brandy Scott sits down with reporter Ashleigh Stewart, who writes for The National, to talk about her critically-acclaimed first novel, and about her second one already in…
“Excellent characterisation and the ability to conjure cliquey, insecure adolescent world … add up to an immersive and exciting read,” Laura Wilson writes in a review of New Zealand author JP Pomare’s debut…
After delivering one of last year’s biggest bestsellers with The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Te Awamutu-raised Heather Morris is ready to reveal Cilka’s Journey as a follow-up. Morris recreated the experiences of Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian…
Auckland-born IT consultant-turned-author Graeme Simsion’s mega-successful Rosie books have sold almost five million copies in 40-plus countries since The Rosie Project in 2013. Readers fell in love with genetics professor Don Tillman who developed a…
“Touted as a ‘literary thriller’, a genre classification often used to characterise a book written by an author who does not usually write crime fiction, Call Me Evie might best…
Recently claiming top spot on The New York Times paperback bestseller list, New Zealand author and screenwriter Heather Morris’ historical novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz has now been published in Persian and is available…
Ernest Shackleton’s account of his mission and New Zealander Bill Manhire’s Field Notes are among Canadian author Jean McNeil’s favourites about the Antarctic continent. “Antarctica is the fifth largest continent, but it is home to almost…
The tale of a three-legged donkey has become a surprise Christmas bestseller thanks to a viral video of a grandmother reading it to her grandson. The Wonky Donkey, written by New Zealander Craig Smith,…
The research for Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni’s book Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964 has uncovered and drawn on many new first-hand accounts of Hydra’s artists and writers,…
Wellington-born Nina Powles is one of the three recipients of the inaugural Women Poets’ prize, which aims to celebrate the empowerment of women and reward “creatively ambitious practitioners who are making or are capable…
New Zealander Redmond Wallis plays a role in the new book, Half the Perfect World, which tells the story of the post-war international artist community that formed on the Greek island of Hydra, and…
Spanning unusual cruelty and extraordinary kindness, authors from New Zealander Janet Frame to Briton Pat Barker explore an unsettling branch of medicine. The Guardian looks at the top ten books about psychiatry and includes Frame’s…
New Zealand-born author Paul Ewen’s creation Francis Plug, sociopathic stalker of literary celebrities, returns in, Francis Plug: Writer in Residence. Ben Myers reviews the book for The Spectator. “Plug first appeared as the unhinged narrator of 2014’s…
“New Zealander Ashleigh Young’s Can You Tolerate This? is an extremely charming essay collection, comprised mainly of snapshots of Young’s life from childhood onwards; walking across gravel roads hand in…
A Scottish grandmother’s reading of New Zealander Craig Smith’s 2009 children’s picture book The Wonky Donkey to her grandson in a home video has seen demand for it skyrocket around the…
At first, New-Zealand-born Heather Morris hadn’t intended on writing a novel. When Morris first struck up a friendship with an elderly man named Ludwig Sokolov, she had imagined his incredible story as a screenplay. Sokolov…
New Zealand-born author Ruth Park’s novel, The Harp in the South caused an uproar in 1948 for its portrayal of working-class life. Now, the Sydney Theatre Company has turned it into an epic stage…
Allen Curnow, who died in 2001 at the age of 90, was one of the greatest New Zealand writers: poet, verse dramatist, critic, groundbreaking and controversial anthologist. Principally through the agency of late literary…
“My first publishing negotiation for Ruth Park was conducted in 1971, in Angus and Robertson’s rabbit warren of offices in Lower George Street. Ruth was already a distinguished writer,” Park’s longtime literary agent Tim…
New Zealand Booker Prize-winning novelist Eleanor Catton recently spoke with The Guardian on the crackpot astrological study she’d like to write, and the book she finds “dishonest, pious and vengeful”, for the newspaper’s regular…
New Zealand novelist Kirsty Gunn was in London recently listening to Scottish author Ali Smith talk about Katherine Mansfield. Gunn’s article about the event appears in The Scotsman. “ talk, hosted by the
“When I uprooted my family from Seattle this year to move to Wellington, I knew little of the foreign, faraway place beyond its reputation for grey days and great coffee,” Maggie Trapp writes for…
Wellington writer Ashleigh Young’s debut essay collection Can You Tolerate This? is New Yorker-recommended summer reading. “Two things happened the first week I moved to New York, in February. I met up with a friend…
Peter Fleming, an amiable-sounding New Zealander, professes for a living at the Cass Business School at City University London. Once, business schools taught accounting, finance, and profit-and-loss. Nowadays the institutions seem to specialise in profit-IS-loss critiques…
Acclaimed by the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, as “the most arresting and original new young poet”, New Zealander Hera Lindsay Bird, 31, is one of the stars of the new generation of “Instapoets”…
Ten years after his symptoms first took hold of him, New Zealander Brent Williams has written a graphic novel that is part memoir and part self-help book. Out of the Woods: A Journey Through…
A history book by New Zealander Winston Cowie called, Conquistador Puzzle Trail, which suggests that the Spanish or Portuguese may have discovered New Zealand before the Dutchman Abel Tasman is causing a new stir….
You’d think that spending your adolescence watching your sister – in this case, Lorde – become a world-famous pop princess might make you insecure, but 19-year-old India Yelich says no: She swears she won’t…
Dame Ngaio Marsh’s skilfully completed “continuation novel”, set in a New Zealand hospital, is an exquisite reminder of the brilliance of Marsh’s London detective Inspector Alleyn, Sophie Hannah writes in a review of the…
Wellington author, poet and literary editor Ashleigh Young will open the Bathurst Writers’ and Readers’ Festival on May 4. The festival consists of three days of live streamed sessions direct from the Sydney Writers’ Festival…
“Roderick Alleyn, the ineffably posh Scotland Yard detective created by Dame Ngaio Marsh, returns for a posthumous outing with the help of Stella Duffy, herself a distinguished crime writer,” Andrew Taylor writes…
“The Necessary Angel’s literary preoccupations are familiar territory for Stead, a distinguished novelist, poet and critic who was for many years professor of English at the University of Auckland,” Financial Times correspondent Zoë…
Wellingtonian Petra Kotrotsos is not your average 21-year-old, according to Melbourne-based Greek community newspaper Neos Kosmos. A video blogger and aspiring filmmaker, she’s also a cancer veteran, having been through various treatments since she…
Auckland-born Ruth Park and Australians Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead, writers born more or less as the 20th century dawned, followed their flame, each woman, as Queensland-based literary scholar Ann-Marie Priest sympathetically shows…
For a couple of days a week, Ben Sanders, 28, is a mild-mannered New Zealand engineer; the rest of the time he’s dreaming crimes and mayhem on the mean streets of the United States….
Out of one of the worst periods of human history comes an inspirational story, a beacon of light amidst the dark ruins of the Holocaust. For three years before his death in 2006, Lale…
“Given that his single-masted creation M5 is too tall to pass beneath Ron Holland had trouble holding a ‘personal memoir’ to 400 pages…
As the overall winner of the 2017 Samoa Observer Tusitala short story competition, Samoan New Zealander, Liana Roberts-Letiu, 21, is as intriguing as the title of her short story entry “An Elegant Tantrum”, Elizabeth…
“How many stories about octopuses escaping from their confines can there be,” writes Jacqueline Cutler in an article published on NJ.com. When she was one page into the kids book “
Like a couple of lab rats, professors New Zealander André Spicer and Swede Carl Cederström have subjected themselves to every conceivable test in pursuit of perfection, hoping to become better human beings, smarter, more…
Shoshana Sachi, 30, explains what it’s like for a New Zealander being a “triple threat minority” in Hollywood – an immigrant woman of colour in a Vice magazine opinion piece. “It’s not a new phenomenon…
Photographing birds and tinkering with words were two of the late John Clarke’s favourite pastimes. In a Guardian article, they come together in excerpts from a new book showcasing the New Zealander’s body of…
Graphic novel, Out of the Woods: A Journey through Depression and Anxiety, by New Zealand writer Brent Williams and Turkish illustrator Korkut Öztekin, is an account of Williams’ catastrophic experience of depression and anxiety…
He mentions Dylan in the same breath as Ovid, Virgil and Dante. The Guardian’s Zoe Williams meets New Zealander Richard Thomas, the classics professor who has spent half a century decoding Bob Dylan’s imagery,…
“It took six months for New Zealander Richard Thomas to draft the manuscript for his newest book, Why Bob Dylan Matters, a study, among other things, of the songwriter’s deep and abiding connection to…
The upstairs room of an indie bookstore. A book launch for a local author. Crisps and wine are being handed out, a buzz is in the air, congratulations are showered upon the young writer….
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