(Robert) Philip Temple (born in Yorkshire, England in 1939) is a Dunedin-based New Zealand author of novels, children's stories, and non-fiction. His work is characterised by a strong association with the outdoors and New Zealand ecology.
His early work was non-fiction, describing mountaineering expeditions to New Guinea and New Zealand and includes Nawok! (1962) Castles in the Air: Men and Mountains in New Zealand (1969) and The World at Their Feet (1973).
Following this Temple produced a number of novels - The Explorer (1975), Stations (1979), Beak of the Moon (1981), Sam (1984), Dark of the Moon (1993), and To Each His Own (1999) - and many children's books, among which the most notable are The Legend of the Kea (1986), Kakapo, Parrot of the Night (1988), and Kotuku, Flight of the White Heron (1994).
More recently, Temple has turned to an autobiographical relation of his own mountaineering adventures (The Last True Explorer (2002)) and a multi-awardwinning history of the Wakefield clan in New Zealand (A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields (Auckland University Press, 2002), which won the Ernest Scott History Prize in 2003, the Ian Wards Prize for Historical Writing in 2003, and the Biography category of the 2003 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. He was also awarded the 2003 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency and the 2005 Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement in non-fiction.
Famous quotes containing the words philip and/or temple:
“Et in Arcadia ego.
[I too am in Arcadia.]”
—Anonymous, Anonymous.
Tomb inscription, appearing in classical paintings by Guercino and Poussin, among others. The words probably mean that even the most ideal earthly lives are mortal. Arcadia, a mountainous region in the central Peloponnese, Greece, was the rustic abode of Pan, depicted in literature and art as a land of innocence and ease, and was the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance (1590)
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)