The Magus and His Protégés
“Do creative writing courses work? Judge for yourselves.” The Guardian’s literary gossip column reports on the findings of a recent NZ Listener poll naming the country’s top 10 authors under 40. Six of them…
News of New Zealanders via Global Media
Welding the past
Auto da Fay, Fay Weldon’s memoirs spanning her NZ upbringing and early adulthood in London, reviewed in the New York Times. “You hesitate to label Auto da Fay – a virtuoso triple pun on…
Slow burner
Annamarie Jagose’s Slow Water – the tale of a gradual unravelling of English class systems and sexual identities on a voyage to colonial NZ – praised in the SMH. “The book has a wide…
Living the High Life
Sir Edmund Hillary received a hero’s welcome in London at an hour-long signing of his books High Adventure and View from the Summit. Dozens of admirers queued in the rain for a chance to…
Spoken word
The old and new schools of NZ literature were represented at May’s Sydney Writers Festival, with eminent man of letters CK Stead and fresh talent Chad Taylor both in attendance. The two…
Tremain Mines Our Past
The latest offering from award-winning British author, Rose Tremain, finds its inspiration in mid-19th century NZ and thwarted edge expectations: “We will not cling to familiar ways. We will imagine ourselves reborn over there….
New Romantics
Young urban women in NZ and Australia are the target market for a recently re-vamped Mills & Boon series. Publisher Harlequin hopes to snare Sex & The City fans rather than those of…
Bone people a modern classic
Keri Hulme’s the bone people featured in a Guardian poll of the Top 50 novels by women writers. The NZ Booker Prize winner sits alongside Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in the list of…
People together: NZ re-imagined
CBC critic, Eleanor Watchel, travelled through NZ to interview some of NZ’s literary animals in their natural habitats. The Writers & Company radio special celebrated a literary landscape that included authors Patricia Grace, Bill…
“Sex is cheap, but domination isn’t”
Former NZ university lecturer and academic, Jody Hanson, interviewed in The Age on her newfound role as a dominatrix and writer in Melbourne. Known on the dungeon circuit as Mistress J, Hanson conducts seminars,…
“The Nick Cave of New Zealand literature”
Chad Taylor’s growing international reputation continues to buzz, this time in The Australian. In Electric drug-addled number crunchers negotiate the power cuts of Auckland’s sweltering summer of 1998, “This is a rare and…
The Book of Fame (and fortune) for Lloyd Jones
Lloyd Jones’ The Book of Fame has won the $40,000 biennial Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize, Australia’s most lucrative literary award. The Book of Fame is a poetic national myth-making account of the 1905 All…
Boyens on Rings writing
Writer Philippa Boyens speaks out on her own epic quest; adapting the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the screen. With her collaborators Walsh, Jackson and Sinclair, Boyens battled against political misreadings, weird names…
Bright Spark
Chad Taylor’s Electric continues to receive great press from leading reviewers. Guardian: “The hypnotic pull of Taylor’s story lies in the zigzag dance of its forlorn characters, casting a murky, uneasy sense of doom….
A novel life
Margaret Birkinshaw, mother of NZ-edged novelist Fay Weldon and acclaimed author in her own right, has died aged 95. Renowned for her passion, confidence and sense of adventure, many lament her refusal to pen…
Giving voice to the past
Lynda Chanwai-Earle’s challenging one-woman play about growing up Chinese in NZ – Ka Shue (‘Letters Home’) – earned her a major write-up in Hawaii’s Star Bulletin. Described as a “fascinating look at a relatively…
Literary dairy export
Sarah-Kate Lynch has forsaken editorship of New Zealand Woman’s Weekly in favour of a career in fiction, with a first novel Blessed Are the Cheesemakers. While Guardian reviewer Helen Falconer finds the book “somewhat…
Edge of the alphabet conjurer has cancer
SMH pays tribute to Janet Frame – “one of New Zealand’s most celebrated and enigmatic writers” – who recently revealed she is terminally ill with cancer. Frame’s biographer Michael King (Wrestling with the Angel)…
Epilogue Written to a Life of Words
NZ lost one of its edgiest inhabitants with the death of Janet Frame from acute myeloid leukemia on January 29. Frame, the author of 11 novels, 5 collections of short stories, a poetry collection,…
Taylor electrifies critics
NZ writer Chad Taylor impresses international critics with his new noir novel, Electric. Pulp: “Dark, intense, fast-paced, and perceptive, both noir literary thriller and pulp crime fiction Cool, surreal and sexy – make…
Good clean ball
“Small but perfectly formed.” Lloyd Jones’ The Book of Fame included in SMH‘s tribute to the short novel, or novella. Jones joins the likes of Michael Ondaatje and Jeanette Winterson as one who achieves…
Intellectual Grand Slam
John Clarke – the NZ comedian who “rates as a national institution” across the Tasman – delights critics with his latest book, The Tournament. A blistering satire, The Tournament involves a fictitious tennis contest…
“The Prospero of NZ letters”
“Take a Las Vegas gambling magnate who believes in the usefulness of books, add a distinguished poet and a betting pool of natural talent. What do you get? A literary renaissance that has floored…
Sunny praise for Chidgey
The Strength of the Sun by Lower Hutt writer Catherine Chidgey makes LA Times Best Books list for 2002. “An exquisitely written, curiously tantalizing book that looks something like a mystery story but is…
Not All Doom and Gloom
Wellington author Damien Wilkins counters small-town unease and drug-addled characters with a good dose of black comedy in Chemistry. New Statesman: ” a world of jealousies, scandals, and suffocating boredom … Although unrepentantly…
Wilkins’ Latest Bonds with Reviewer
Guardian reviewer Phil Whitaker assesses Damien Wilkins’ novel, Chemistry, a chronicle of drug addiction and family trauma set in small-town NZ. “Wilkins is brilliant at character, and his resistance to movement for the family…
Booker Prize: end of an era?
Observer critics liken this year’s Man Booker Prize win to that of NZ’s Keri Hulme on “that unforgettable night in the mid-80s.” Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi won thanks to “a virtuoso display…
Freudian felines
NZ-based author/psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson attempts to unravel the feline psyche in The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats: A Journey into the Feline Heart. The “witty, elusive and often enchanting” book challenges the place…
Moving biography as an art form
Nola Farman reviews Roger Horrocks’ Len Lye biography for Art Monthly Australia, calling it “the revelation of yet another brilliant and creative New Zealand moment.” The biography is Horrocks’ tribute to an artist he…
Reforging public perceptions
James Belich’s history of C20th NZ, Paradise Reforged, applauded in lengthy TLS article. Reviewer Jane Samson: “It is refreshing to have a personal vision of the country’s history from an astounding scholar who…
Steady Hand
A thematic juggling act handled with skill: C.K Stead’s The Secret History of Modernism intersperses a tale of young love with one family’s experience of the Holocaust. Washington Post Reviewer Chris Lehman: “In the…
Critic goes ga ga for Noble
Reviewed: Justin Paton’s, Anne Noble: States of Grace, the accompaniment to Noble’s epoynmous recent exhibition. The book, “is the type of publication that makes people pat books in bookstores one finds oneself…
The Commonwealth cool club
Emily Perkins muses on OE, clinging to Mummy Britannia’s apron strings, and what being in the Commonwealth meant for her as a young New Zealander: “Being a member of the Commonwealth always seemed, to…
Reforging Paradise
“No one likes snapshots of one sitting on Mother’s knee being shown at one’s 21st birthday, especially if the snaps were taken at age 19.” Novelist Emily Perkins reviews James Belich’s history of NZ:…
Critique of Pure Fay
Fay Weldon’s autobiography (up to year 32) continues to entertain. The Guardian is seduced by the lure of biography: “her fiction suddenly seems a whole lot less peculiar … much of the work…
Making myths
Lower-Hutt author Lloyd Jones gives the Aussies something heavier than Pavlova to think about: “Now and then someone will write a book in the smaller country that demands the bigger country sit up and…
From strength to strength
Boston Globe finds the UV rays result in intense expression in Lower Hutt writer Catherine Chidgey’s latest novel, Strength of the Sun: “a meticulously constructed novel of true imagination.”
Where is New Zealand again?
Doing the Billie’s Kiss PR, Elizabeth Knox pauses and reflects on the exotic settings for her books with a wry comment on her cultural identity: “I know I’m a New Zealand writer, but I’m…
The novel is dead, long live the novel
Keri Hulme joins a list of postcolonial booker people ratttling the bones of the form: “The years the Booker Prize doesn’t go to an English novel the winning book tends to be an interesting…
Life and Loves …
NZEdged author Fay Weldon traverses a contradictory, but never dull life, in her autobiography Auto de Fay and finds her muse in the edge: “Always! Yes, always! I wanted to see more, it was…
Karl Popper’s NZEdged Legacy
Roger James in the The Guardian ponders the centenary of the birth of one of the C20th most original (and controversial) thinkers, philosopher Karl Popper. In an affirmation of edge theory Popper’s most influential…
Legacy of Letters
LA Times special focuses on Katherine Mansfield’s Wellington. “Considered one of the 20th century’s finest short story writers” – and the only one to make Virginia Woolf jealous – Mansfield has remained…
Writer’s block
“The literary traffic across the Tasman isn’t as brisk as it should be. Much good writing has to come from Auckland or Wellington to Australia by way of publication in London; and New Zealand…
“A work of almost perfect pitch”
CK Stead’s new novel The Secret History of Modernism reviewed inThe Age: “Stead is very clever and he’s comfortable on this ground, patrolling that sometimes misty territory between truth and invention, between history and…
Nabokov’s Butterflies
The Brian Boyd (University of Auckland Professor and the world’s leading Nabokov scholar) edited Nabokov’s Butterflies – a collection of Vladimir Nabokov’s writings about butterflies, reviewed by Mark Ridley in The Times Literary Supplement.
“Swift and edgy”…
Denver Post review of Margaret Mahy’s new book 24 Hours. “Her writing is clean and spare, as lucid in describing the ponderous weight of a backpack as in narrating an unnerving car…
A Russian soul
Joanna Wood’s “beautifully written” biography of “short story master” Katherine Mansfield, Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield, details the New Zealand-born writer’s lifelong passion for everything Russian: “She liked to wear Russian clothes,…
Shadow play
The allure of the artistic life, “the journey towards the light” is the central concern of Maurice Gee’s “thoughtful” new novel Ellie and the Shadow Man, reviewed by Nicola Walker.
Stephenson wins UK Book of the Year Award
Not the Nine O Clock News comedian turned psychotherapist turned biographer, NZ-Edged Pamela Stephenson wins the book of the year prize at the British Book Awards for her “frank and often harrowing” account of…
NYNZ – fringe thrills
Chris Niles‘s new novel Hell’s Kitchen well-received in the Big Bad Apple: “Here’s a novel that’s crowded, rushed, excited, mixed-up, fun, dangerous and a little dirty. In other words, it perfectly…
From NZ with Love
“Spunky New Zealander” Mary Hobbs, editor of NZ Outside, and her mountain guide husband Charlie, use their own money to put together a book from their fellow countrymen to New Yorkers rocked by…
East to the Edge
A book exploring the distinctly Japanese art of Kabuki has been “beautifully translated into English” by New Zealander Kirsten McIvor. Kabuki Today throws open the door to the mysterious world of the ancient theatrical…
Madcap Pamela bestselling biographer
New Zealand-born Pamela Stephenson, practicing psychotherapist and ex-comedian (part of the anarchic foursome who made the seminal and career launching comedy Not the Nine o’clock News – along with Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith…
Weldon CBE
New Zealand-raised London-based writer Fay Weldon is now Fay Weldon, CBE. “One feels very flattered,” says Weldon, honoured for her charitable work as well as her writing.
More than Mansfield in Bloomsbury Group
Liz Calder, the NZedged head of Bloomsbury publishing (publishers of such literary luminaries as Michael Ondaatje, Will Self and John Irving), talks to The Guardian about the touted blockbuster battle, book and film drawn…
Author graced with further award
Author Patricia Grace is honoured with the 21 Kiriyama Pacific Rim book prize for her novel Dogside Stories. The award was established to promote cross-cultural understanding.
