Writers
Novelists Patricia Grace, Albert Wendt, Maurice Gee and children’s author Margaret Mahy, are prominent in New Zealand.
Keri Hulme gained prominence when her novel, The Bone People, won the Booker Prize. Witi Ihimaera wrote the novel that became the critically acclaimed movie Whale Rider, directed by Nikki Caro. His works deal with Māori life in the modern world, often incorporating fantastic elements.
Writers claimed by New Zealand as its own include immigrants, such as South African-born Robin Hyde, and emigrants who went into exile but wrote about New Zealand, like Dan Davin and Katherine Mansfield. Erewhon, a novel set in New Zealand and written by Samuel Butler as a result of a stay in New Zealand, arguably belongs primarily to English literature. Likewise the New Zealand work of Karl Wolfskehl, resulting from his sojourn in Auckland, belongs rather to the story of German literature.
Read more about this topic: New Zealand Literature
Famous quotes containing the word writers:
“To the degree that respect for professors ... has risen in our society, respect for writers has fallen. Today the professorial intellect has achieved its highest public standing since the world began, while writers have come to be called “men of letters,” by which is meant people who are prevented by some obscure infirmity from becoming competent journalists.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“Good writers have two things in common: they would rather be understood than admired, and they do not write for hairsplitting and hypercritical readers.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Hemingway is great in that alone of living writers he has saturated his work with the memory of physical pleasure, with sunshine and salt water, with food, wine and making love and the remorse which is the shadow of that sun.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)