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:
“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius.... They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“It seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B’s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)