Like many writers before her, New Zealand-born Amy Brown takes inspiration from the Australian feminist icon Stella Maria Miles Franklin in her captivating debut novel My Brilliant Sister – but instead of telling Franklin’s…
When author Emily Perkins decided her next novel would be set in the New Zealand capital, her editors in the UK were pleased. The 53-year-old says this specific detail “seemed to spark interest rather…
New Zealand-born author Eleanor Catton’s bestseller Birnam Wood is one of “eight intriguing” paperbacks included in a New York Times piece about book design – “the paperback edition is the second chance, an opportunity…
“Each year, we pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here are the standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times…
Featuring in The Guardian’s regular column, ‘A Moment That Changed Me’, is New Zealand author Anna Smaill, 44, who describes how she fell in love with clothes. “When I was growing up in Auckland in…
New York Times bestselling author Nalini Singh, 46, makes the case for New Zealand’s place atop the world of mystery and thrillers, in a story published by CrimeReads. “Several years ago, I was sitting in…
New Yorker editors and critics choose their “most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads” every Wednesday and on a recent week noticed New Zealand author Catherine Chidgey’s latest fiction, Pet. This…
“The only contemporary writer Virginia Woolf admitted to being jealous of,” New Zealand-born Katherine Mansfield “is one of the greatest short story writers of all time,” Catherine Dent writes for Canada-based humanities-focused site, The…
Auckland-born writer Catherine Chidgey’s latest novel Pet has been included in The New York Times’ regular column, ‘Nine New Books We Recommend This Week’. “In this twisted psychological thriller, a motherless 12-year-old Catholic school student…
It was Haiku Day on 19 August in Japan, and just like many of Japan’s kinenbi or “faux holidays”, the designation stems entirely from wordplay. Haiku Day (haiku no hi) is on 19 August…
New Zealand-born Pippin Barr might just be the most prolific solo game developer in the world. Since 2011 he has released a baffling 81 of them – and while many are just snapshots or…
Among former president Barack Obama’s recommended summer reads for beach, porch or sun lounger is New Zealand author Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, Martin Pengelly reports for The Guardian. “Here’s some books that I’m reading this summer,”…
“Emily Perkins’ previous novel, The Forrests, was longlisted for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and her work for stage and screen includes co-writing the film adaptation of fellow New Zealander and Booker-winner Eleanor Catton’s…
New Zealander Catherine Chidgey’s latest novel, Pet, set in 1980s suburban, Catholic Wellington, moves to a dark denouement powered by lingering uncertainty, Hephzibah Anderson writes in a review of the book for The Observer. “Chidgey’s…
Tayi Tibble, a Māori writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa, has had her poem Creation Story published in The New Yorker. She is the author of two poetry collections, Poūkahangatus and Rangikura, the former
Booker Prize winner New Zealander Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood, will be in conversation with former first minister Nicola Sturgeon at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 24 August, The Herald reports. “A decade after…
The New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2013 for her novel The Luminaries, discusses her latest book, Birnam Wood, with New York Times Book Review podcast host Gilbert…
Literary magazine Granta has announced its 20 most significant British novelists aged under 40, which, for the first time, includes international writers who view the UK as home, the BBC’s culture and media…
“Eleanor Catton’s third novel, Birnam Wood, is a big book, a sophisticated page-turner, that does something improbable: It filters anarchist, monkeywrenching environmental politics, a generational (anti-baby boomer) cri de coeur and a downhill-racing plot…
American author Roberta Silman reviews Claire Harman’s new biography of Katherine Mansfield, All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything, for The Art Fuse. Silman speculates,…
“Influence in writing is often spoken about as something dirty or shameful, something to be avoided, but here it offers a way for artists to connect across decades, to find courage and company outside…
“Now widely anthologised, taught, and considered a paragon of modernist literature, ‘Bliss’ seems to prove what we have discovered as editors of NOON – that a story that generates powerful feeling,…
“It’s taken Eleanor Catton 10 years to follow up on her Booker Prize winning novel of 2013, The Luminaries. Fortunately, her latest offering, Birnam Wood, begins with a bang, quite literally. A series of…
It has been 10 years since New Zealander Eleanor Catton became, at 28, the youngest writer to be awarded the Booker prize, Lisa Allardice writes in a profile piece for The Guardian. Her third…
“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…
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…
“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…
“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…
“‘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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
“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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
“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…
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…
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…
“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…
“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…
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:…
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