Writers
3 February 2023
“The Katherine Mansfield Memorial Garden is a peaceful, oblong-shaped park set in the midst of Thorndon, in Wellington. It is named after the city’s most famous daughter, the short story writer Katherine Mansfield, whose…
Writers | Guardian (The)
19 January 2023
In an edited extract from her foreword to Wild Places: Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield, English author Helen Simpson asks: “How and why did Katherine Mansfield provoke such violent extremes of admiration and hostility, both…
Writers | Telegraph (The)
4 January 2023
“This year, we celebrated the annus mirabilis of literary modernism, whose greatest novel, Ulysses, and greatest poem, The Waste Land, both turned 100 … This year will see another modernist milestone. 9 January 2023 will…
Writers | Literary Review
14 December 2022
“One of Katherine Mansfield’s defining characteristics was her restlessness, both personal and artistic: she was always most at home when on the move,” Claire Harman writes for the Literary Review. “It helped that she…
Writers | Lancashire Post
2 December 2022
“‘When darkness falls in rising mist, Beware the gruesome grizzled grist.’ Watch little smiles light up when they get their hands on this fun-filled picture book featuring a school trip that turns into a…
Writers
15 November 2022
Waitara-born writer Jacqueline Bublitz discusses New Zealand’s “significant contribution to the cannon of popular crime fiction” and recommends four authors “you should be reading now” in an article for CrimeReads. They are: Rose Carlyle…
Writers | New Yorker (The)
9 November 2022
Wellington-born Tayi Tibble’s poetry collection Poūkahangatus has been included in the New Yorker’s ‘Best Books of 2022 So Far’ list.
The influential magazine writes: “Our editors and critics choose this year’s most captivating, notable, brilliant,…
Writers | Financial Times (The)
26 October 2022
In an article about 30-year-old Russian-born British poet Arch Hades, “the highest paid living poet of all time” and the “new meta verse”, Financial Times Baya Simons mentions Wellingtonian Hera Lindsay Bird, 35, part…
Writers | New Yorker (The)
25 October 2022
Wellington poet Tayi Tibble’s award-winning first collection Poūkahangatus has been described by The New Yorker magazine as “smart, sexy … fanciful and dramatic”.
“This collection’s title poem, which describes itself as ‘An Essay About Indigenous…
Writers | Forbes
3 October 2022
In a recent Forbes column, usually “devoted to Western (and sometimes Eastern) ‘Great Books’ or ‘Classics”’, contributor David Bahr this time examines the “minor Classics”. “These books or authors are not quite in the…
Writers | Cumhuriyet Kitap
23 September 2022
A portrait of Janet Frame by American celebrity photographer Jerry Bauer recently featured on the front page of Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet Kitap. Several of Frame’s titles are currently being reprinted in Turkish, her official…
Writers | CNET
20 July 2022
In an interview with American media website CNET, Auckland-born UK-based author Adam Christopher, 44, reveals how he came up with Rey’s parents’ names and how his latest Star Wars novel, Shadow of the Sith,…
Writers | New York Times (The)
2 June 2022
Coming-of-age novels set among the Métis community in Canada, the Māori population in New Zealand and the Crow Nation in Montana were recently reviewed by The New York Times. According to Gregory Brown writing…
Writers | Guardian (The)
14 May 2022
Sydney-based New Zealander Meg Mason, American Louise Erdrich, and Turkish-Briton Elif Shafak are among the contenders for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, offering an ‘escape’ from global crises, Lucy Knight reports for The…
Writers | Guardian (The)
19 April 2022
New Zealander Ruth Shaw has embodied many roles throughout her life: pig farmer, navy deserter, solo sailor, illegal gambler, environmentalist, chef to archbishops, psychiatric patient, failed escort. She’s been arrested twice and married four…
Writers | Guardian (The)
9 April 2022
In a piece for The Guardian, Orwell Prize winning author Ali Smith looks at how the first world war forced writers Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf to rip up convention – and asks if…
Writers | Guardian (The)
29 March 2022
Things have gone right for New Zealand author Becky Manawatu. “Spectacularly,” Tina Makeriti writes in a review for The Guardian. “Unusually for a first book, Auē won New Zealand’s most lucrative fiction prize, the…
Writers | Star Tribune
23 February 2022
New Zealand writer Nina Mingya Powles’ essay collection Small Bodies of Water “just might change the way you see the world” the Star Tribune’s Cory Oldweiler suggests.
“Powles was born in Wellington, and is mixed-raced,…
Writers | BBC
14 February 2022
“James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land are rightly hailed as masterpieces – but they unfairly overshadow 1922’s other great books,” writes John Self in a feature for the BBC, which explores…
Writers | Spectator (The)
25 January 2022
“New Zealand-born James Courage is one of those fine writers who, though he enjoyed considerable success in his lifetime, has now more or less slipped from view. None of the eight novels he published…
Writers | Spinoff (The)
27 September 2021
Despite being one of Scotland’s most iconic children’s books, it has been revealed to the Scots that Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy is actually from New Zealand, Lisa Hodge reports for Edinburgh Live.
“The beloved…
Writers | ExBerliner
25 September 2021
Ahead of her recent reading at Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin (ILB), mould-breaking poet Hinemoana Baker talked English-language magazine Exberliner through her new book, the New Zealand-Berlin connection and why Germans should stop doing the haka.
Christchurch-born…
Writers | Cherwell.org
24 September 2021
In an entertainingly self-deprecating essay for Oxford University’s independent student newspaper Cherwell, Ben Jureidini apologies to the ghost of New Zealand short story master Katharine Mansfield for almost submitting a terribly pretentious theory about…
Writers | Nerd Daily (The)
14 September 2021
The cover of New Zealand-born author Jordan Bartlett’s young adult fantasy novel, Contest of Queens, has been revealed, Elise Dumpleton reports for entertainment site, The Nerd Daily.
Bartlett, a speech language pathologist and certified…
Writers | Guardian (The)
10 September 2021
Fulbright winner Abbas Nazari was one of 433 refugees rescued by New Zealand from the Norwegian cargo ship, Tampa, in 2001 after leaving Indonesia in an unseaworthy boat with his Afghan family. Twenty years…
Writers | Wall Street Journal (The)
30 August 2021
“One of the genuine, if frequently under-recognised, geniuses of 20th-century literature, Katherine Mansfield wrote the majority of her short stories during a frantic creative flourishing between 1920 and 1922 while suffering from the tuberculosis…
Writers | Daily Mail
16 July 2021
“The shimmering azure of the Mediterranean, the dark green of the cypress trees, the scent of thyme, the sound of cicadas on the terrace at dusk … don’t we feel the pull of the…
Writers | Guardian (The)
11 June 2021
New Zealand author Meg Mason’s “moving novel”, Sorrow and Bliss, “about mental illness and sisterly love finds hilarity and wisdom in anguish, without ever diminishing pain”, Clare Clark writes in a review for The…
Writers | Forbes
8 June 2021
If you’ve felt like you’re at a psychological plateau lately, relief may be only a page turn away, Forbes contributor Serenity Gibbons writes. Gibbons has put together a list of books, including You’re Not…
Writers | New York Times (The)
27 April 2021
“Stories of friendships between artists are often told as love stories: the chance meeting, the electric first encounter, the mysterious mutual recognition that would change everything,” Megan O’Grady writes in a feature about creative…
Writers | Sydney Morning Herald (The)
27 February 2021
“The production company behind movies such as 12 Years a Slave, Gone Girl and Bohemian Rhapsody has snapped up” the film and TV rights for Foxton-born Christchurch-raised writer Meg Mason’s latest novel – a…
Writers | New York Times (The)
7 February 2021
New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox’s 2019 novel, The Absolute Book, is reviewed alongside UK-based Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit, by Canadian writer Amal El-Mohtar for The New York Times.
“Here are two novels that are, in some ways, opposites:…
Writers | New York Times (The)
11 December 2020
It’s not every day that a 21-year-old debut author lands near the top of the young adult hardcover list, Elizbeth Egan writes for The New York Times. Chloe Gong, a Shanghai native who grew…
Writers
27 October 2020
Two UK academics from Edge Hill University in Lancashire have taken over editorship of the respected Tinakori: Katherine Mansfield Society Critical Journal, and are hoping to draw further attention to Mansfield’s often overlooked importance…
Writers | Japan Times (The)
29 August 2020
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,…
Writers | Byline Times
3 May 2020
“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…
Writers | Express (The)
20 February 2020
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…
Writers | Slate
19 February 2020
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…
Writers | Sydney Morning Herald (The)
16 October 2019
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…
Writers | New York Times (The)
3 October 2019
“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…
Writers | Wall Street Journal (The)
29 September 2019
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…
Writers | Straits Times (The)
18 September 2019
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)…
Writers | Guardian (The)
28 August 2019
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…
Writers | Guardian (The)
24 August 2019
“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…
Writers | National (The)
6 July 2019
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…
Writers | Guardian (The)
4 May 2019
“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…
Writers | Entertainment Weekly
23 April 2019
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…
Writers | Graeme Simsion | New Daily (The)
14 February 2019
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…
Writers | Brisbane Times
4 February 2019
“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…
Writers | New York Times (The) | Tehran Times | Times of India (The)
31 January 2019
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…
Writers | Guardian (The)
18 January 2019
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…
Writers | Telegraph (The)
14 January 2019
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,…
Writers | The Conversation
10 November 2018
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,…
Writers | Guardian (The)
6 November 2018
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…
Writers | Sydney Morning Herald (The)
27 October 2018
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…
Writers | Guardian (The)
26 October 2018
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…