Gray’s marvellous mutants
New Zealand comic book writer and editor of the Marvel Collectors’ Edition line of magazines Scott Gray is interviewed by Comic Book Resources about “his take on the second generation of X-Men, the villains…
News of New Zealanders via Global Media
Writings of here and there
Author Kapka Kassabova moved to New Zealand from Bulgaria in 1992 at the age of 17 “having suffered the full experience of ‘Socialism with a Human Face’ that was the notional premise behind the…
Is it or isn’t it
29 January 2009 – University of Canterbury professor of philosophy Denis Dutton’s latest book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution – which supposes that art appreciation stems first from evolutionary adaptions made during…
Perchance for professor
Auckland-born poet Fleur Adcock is one of eight names being discussed by the Oxford University English faculty to take up the position of professor of poetry when current incumbent Christopher Ricks comes to the…
Into the bazaar
New Zealand Herald columnist and travel writer Jill Worrall is interviewed by Iranian freelance journalist Kourosh Ziabari for The Moderate Voice, a widely-read independent political news blog, on the topic: ‘Iran – the most…
Thriller crashes onto shelves
Wellington author New York-based John Wareham’s latest book The President’s Therapist and the Secret Intervention to Treat the Alcoholism of George Bush hits US stores on January 20, Inauguration Day. The President’s Therapist is…
Out of the dark
January 17, 2009 – Auckland writer CK Stead’s Collected Poems 1951-2006 is reviewed this week in the Guardian. “The main stylistic influence on Stead is probably Ezra Pound, from whom he has inherited a…
Evolution of the Artist
Denis Dutton, philosophy of art professor at The University of Canterbury, has published a book building off his standard-bearing art theory website Arts & Letters Daily. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution…
Enchantment for sharing
Children’s writer Margaret Mahy, recipient of the Carnegie Medal for Children’s Literature, the Hans Christian Andersen Medal and a host of other awards, says the shared experience of a parent reading to a child…
Raskolnikov reincarnate
New Zealand author Neil Cross discusses his latest novel The Burial in UK publication Metro. “I’ve always been fascinated by guilt,” says the 39-year-old, who divides his time between producing fiction and writing for…
Better off before
New Zealand historian David Thomson was one of the first people to write about the “phenomenon” of the “lucky generation” born during the period from the late 1920s through the 1930s according to The…
Coastal reflections
On March 1910 Katherine Mansfield arrived at the English seaside town of Rottingdean in Sussex where she took a room above the local grocer. While Mansfield craved library books “the sun shone and the…
With Grand Applause
Wellington-based author Eleanor Catton’s first novel The Rehearsal has been bought by US publisher Granta for a six-figure sum. Currently working on her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a 2008 Glenn Schaeffer…
In Search of a History
New Zealand film producer and public speaker Anna Wilding is now writing regularly for the TennisGrandStand site, and in her first column, as the US Open approaches, she writes about her great uncle, tennis…
Figments of the imagination
Wellington author Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamhunter Duet is reviewed in Canadian newspaper The Star Phoenix. The two “intricate” fantasy titles are highly recommended for young adults, and are described as “intriguing” and “intelligent”. The first…
Confronting history
Historian and media commentator Paul Moon’s latest book This Horrid Practice delves into the subject of Maori cannibalism, the author arguing that the amount of evidence of the action was “overwhelming” and “too important…
Travel award for editor
Taumarunui travel writer and publishing editor of Inside Tourism Nigel Coventry has been named the 2008 Pasific Asia Travel Association Travel Journalist of the Year. PATA president Peter de Jong said Coventry had been…
Introducing Tauwhitu
In a Kerikeri pub sometime in the 1980s, Boston author Christina Thompson met a group of Maori having pints after a day spent diving for crayfish and uses this first encounter with native New…
Underwear wanderings
Christchurch travel writer and columnist Joe Bennett’s quest to find the origins of his five-pack of Chinese-manufactured underpants, took him to a remote western corner of China and the cotton fields of Xinjiang. Bennett’s…
Piercing Revelation
Janet Frame’s 1963 novel, Towards Another Summer, written in London and first published posthumously in New Zealand in 2007, is considered by Guardian reviewer Rachel Cooke. Towards Another Summer is based on a weekend…
Hatched on a poultry farm
Author Joy Cowley’s novel Chicken Feathers is reviewed this month in The Boston Globe, her storytelling described as “effortless mastery”. Sweden had Astrid Lindgren, and France its Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Each great writer possesses…
Sausage Day cinema
Janet Frame was a waitress at Dunedin’s Grand Hotel when she wrote A Night at the Opera, until now unknown, thought to be written in 1954, and this month published in the latest issue…
Short lines hide
Wellington poet Bill Manhire takes the cover of the 2008 spring edition of literary periodical Poetry London, in which his poems ‘Song with a Chorus’, ‘Velvet’ and ‘The Carpe Diem Poem’ appear. Manhire read…
Colonial Space Rockets
First published in New Zealand in 1881, the second volume of science fiction novella The Great Romance lay hidden on the shelves of Dunedin’s Hocken Library until the 1990s when the work was discovered….
London from home
New Zealand author Emily Perkins leans out to close a window at her publisher’s in Soho and “raising her voice over a building site, takes a deep breath of London air to say, ‘It’s…
Autumn and Rainbows
From Takaka, Telegraph foreign correspondent Peter Foster writes a weekly blog on life in the small South Island town, population: 1,182. Foster was the Telegraph’s South Asia Correspondent for four years until January 2008…
Lucky Dagg at the Logies
Comedian and writer John Clarke, born in Palmerston North and famous for creating the “elegantly dressed” farmer Fred Dagg and his seven sons, all Trevors, will be inducted into the Australian Logies Hall of…
Marsh Remembered
Christchurch-born writer Dame Ngaio Marsh has been named one of the Daily Telegraph’s 50 favourite crime writers, with Vintage Murder (1937) recommended. Marsh is described as “a New Zealander who created a quintessentially English…
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….
Campion on Frame
Jane Campion writes about her encounters with creative compatriot Janet Frame in The Guardian this month. The NZ-born filmmaker brought Frame’s life story to an international audience with her acclaimed film An Angel at…
Writing for Change
Icon Books (UK) has just released its third edition of 50 Facts That Should Change the World, the best-selling book by NZ journalist Jessica Williams. 50 Facts aims to shock readers into social…
Posthumous gem
The Janet Frame Literary Trust has posthumously published a novella written by the great NZ author in 1963. Dismissed by Frame as “embarrassingly personal”, Towards Another Summer is about a homesick NZ writer who…
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…
Close But No Booker
Wellington author Lloyd Jones has missed out on the Man Booker prize, despite his novel Mister Pip being the bookies’ favourite to win. The award went to Irish author Anne Enright for The Gathering….
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…
“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…
Booker number two?
Lloyd Jones‘ Mister Pip has made the Man Booker Prize longlist, alongside works by Ian McEwan and A N Wilson. The 13 titles were selected from over 100 international entries. “As for…
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…
NZ Academic Unlocks 17th Century Secrets
Research by a NZ academic launched a 40-year code-breaking endeavour that has resulted in the publication of an important 17th century English diary. Robin Gwynn, formerly an associate professor of history at Massey University,…
No ordinary life
A new book about London literary marriages features NZ author Katherine Mansfield and her second husband, John Middleton Murry. Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles (1910-1939) by…
Devastating simplicity
Mister Pip, the Commonwealth Prize-winning novel by Wellingtonian Lloyd Jones, is praised both for its lyricism and its deft handling of post-colonial issues in the Guardian. “The simplicity with which he describes the atrocities…
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…
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,…
In the frame
Scottish author Andrew O’Hagan’s inspiring opening address at this month’s Sydney Writers’ Festival included mention of NZ literary great, Janet Frame. The author of Living in the Maniototo, The Edge of the Alphabet and…
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…
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…
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,…
“A Little Savage From New Zealand”
A Telegraph review of Penguin’s Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield celebrates the influential author’s short yet remarkable life. Born in Wellington in 1888, Mansfield made a strong and lasting impression on the London literary…
Writing in the margins
Auckland writer Tzeming Mok spoke about globalization and the Chinese Diaspora at last month’s Shanghai Literature Festival. Mok, a published poet, author, blogger and journalist, is known for writing about issues of displacement, with…
Smither reveals wild side over tea and cake
NZ poet laureate Elizabeth Smither was a guest speaker at the recent Kuala Lumpur International Literary Festival. A journalist interviewing her for the Malaysian Star was amazed at her calm and easygoing persona, which…
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…
Making Poetry Out of Darkness
A profile of novelist, poet and critic CK Stead focuses on both his historical prominence in the NZ literary scene and his remarkable late-life burst of creativity. Last year, Stead (74) published his eleventh…
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…
South Pacific literati
Five NZ writers are finalists for this year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards. Ocean Roads by James George, Mr Pip by Lloyd Jones and The Fainter by Damien Wilkins…
Linda Niccol notches British Screenplay Prize
Wellington writer Linda Niccol has won the prestigious British Short Screenplay Prize ahead of 200+ other screenwriters. Her script for The Handkerchief was judged best script by a panel that included Kenneth Branagh,…
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…
