The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  Kevin Ireland (1933–) was born and grew up in Auckland. As a young writer he spent time in Frank Sargeson’s bach. He was co-founder in 1957 of the literary magazine Mate. Ireland spent twenty-five years from 1959 overseas, mainly in England, where he worked for the Times. He has also lived in Ireland and Bulgaria and has translated Bulgarian poetry into English. He now lives in England. Known chiefly as a lyrical poet with links to Glover and Fairburn, Ireland also has a notable satirical talent, exemplified in the 1990 volume Tiberius at the Beehive.

  Anna Jackson (1967–) was born in Auckland. She studied English at Auckland and Oxford Universities, and now teaches English at Victoria University. She has published books of poetry, as well as fiction and several books of criticism, including A Poetics of the Diary (2011) based on her PhD thesis.

  Louis Johnson (1924–88) was born in Wellington and grew up in the Manawatū. He left school early and became a trainee reporter on the Manawatu Standard. He worked on the Labour Party newspaper the Southern Cross and trained as a teacher. In the 1950s Johnson was part of the ‘Wellington Group’ of poets which included James K. Baxter, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell and Peter Bland. The group opposed the nationalist agendas of Allen Curnow and his associates. In 1951 Johnson established the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook which he edited until 1964. From 1963 he worked for the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education. Between 1968 and 1980 Johnson lived outside New Zealand but returned to Wellington in retirement. These years were productive in terms of his own work and the editing and promoting of the work of others and included six years as a member of the Literary Fund Advisory Committee as a PEN New Zealand representative.

  Andrew Johnston (1963–), poet, anthologist and critic, was born in Upper Hutt and educated at Victoria and Auckland Universities. He was books page editor of the Evening Post from 1991 to 1996. In 1995 he was the New Zealand representative at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 1997 he moved to France. He worked for the International Herald Tribune in Paris from 1999 to 2010 and now works for UNESCO.

  Lloyd Jones (1955–), novelist, short-story writer and essayist, was born in Lower Hutt, educated at Victoria University and has worked as a journalist. His first novel was published in 1985; his 2006 novel Mister Pip was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Jones is the editor of the Montana Estate Essay Series begun in 2002 and issued by Four Winds Press.

  M.K. [Michael Kennedy] Joseph (1914–81) was born in England. His well-to-do Catholic family immigrated to New Zealand in 1924. Educated at Auckland and Oxford Universities, he returned to New Zealand in 1946 after war service, taking a position as lecturer in English at Auckland University. Over a long career as an academic Joseph also published poetry, science fiction, historical novels and a university novel. His major works are the war novel, A Soldier’s Tale (1976), and a body of poetry produced mainly in the 1950s and 1960s.

  Anna Kavan [pseud. of Helen Ferguson née Woods] (1901–68) was born in Cannes to English parents, married at an early age, and lived for a time in Burma. Her marriage at an end, she returned to London and trained as an artist, married again, and published six novels. Heroin addiction and depression led to time in psychiatric institutions. In 1940 she published Asylum Pieces under the name Anna Kavan. She spent some time in the USA and New Zealand during the Second World War, returning to England to train as a psychologist and to work for the literary journal Horizon. Her final and most successful novel Ice was published in 1967.

  Jan Kemp (1949–) was born in Hamilton. She studied English at Auckland University, emerging as a poet in the early 1970s as part of the group of poets—and a rare female voice—associated with the literary magazine Freed. Kemp has lived overseas for much of her adult life, but retains an association with New Zealand and its literature.

  Thomas Kendall (c. 1778–1832), missionary and linguist, was born in Lincolnshire, son of a not very prosperous farmer. He worked as a teacher, a draper and a grocer but in 1805 experienced a religious conversion and joined the Church Missionary Society who sent him, accompanied by his wife and growing family, to the Bay of Islands mission at Rangihoua as a schoolteacher. In 1815 he published the first book in Māori, A korao no New Zealand; or, the New Zealander’s First Book; being an Attempt to Compose some Lessons for the Instruction of the Natives. In 1820 he returned to England with chiefs Hongi Hika and Waikato to work with Professor Samuel Lee at Cambridge compiling a Māori grammar. Despite their successes, scholarly and social (the two chiefs met George IV), on Kendall’s return his relationships with his peers, Māori and Pākehā, deteriorated. His description of Māori cosmology was felt rather too admiring for an evangelical missionary: he wrote that its ‘apparent sublimity’ ‘almost completely turned [him] from a Christian to a Heathen’ and his affair with Tungaroa, daughter of a Rangihoua tohunga, caused Marsden to attempt to dismiss him. The family moved to Chile and then to New South Wales and he was drowned in a storm in Jervis Bay.

  Anne Kennedy (1959–), born in Wellington, has a BA in music and an MA in musical aspects of New Zealand literature. Kennedy now lives in Hawai‘i where she teaches at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She is a scriptwriter, poet and novelist and is co-editor of Trout: An Online Journal of Arts and Literature.

  Fiona Kidman (1940–) was born in Hāwera. She worked as a journalist and made her mark with her first novel, A Breed of Women (1979), which had a wide readership, reflecting as it did the concerns of the women’s movement and the changing position of women in New Zealand. It was followed by novels, short stories and poetry and essay collections, many dealing with economic deprivation, the radical changes in New Zealand society in the 1980s and the situation of women.

  Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), already by his late twenties a celebrated author, came to New Zealand in 1891 as part of a tour of the southern hemisphere. He travelled to the central North Island thermal region—his story ‘One Lady at Wairakei’ was published in the New Zealand Herald in January 1892. He visited his former schoolteacher in Christchurch and left from Dunedin for Australia on 6 November 1891.

  Joshua Henry Kirby (1821–77) joined the 68th Regiment in 1861 after twenty years’ service in the 86th which served in India during the 1857 Mutiny. Kirby was commander of three companies at the engagement at Gate Pā, near Tauranga, where, as James Belich describes it, ‘An army of 1,700 good British troops, equipped with a strong artillery train [were] defeated by less than one-seventh their number of Maoris’, Ngāi Te Rangi and Ngāti Koheriki, led by Rāwiri Puhirake. Kirby left New Zealand for India in 1866, was the commander of the Scinde District Brigade and died in Belgaum, Karnataka in 1877. His novel Henry Ancrum was published in London in 1872.

  Hilaire Kirkland (1941–75) grew up in Picton, attended Otago University and spent from 1967 to 1974 overseas, some of that time in Portugal where she taught English. She was awarded a BA from Auckland University with an aegrotat pass. A ceremony awarding her the degree was held in National Women’s Hospital just before her death. A collection Blood Clear & Apple Red appeared in 1981.

  Elizabeth Knox (1959–) was born in Wellington and grew up in the Hutt Valley and on the Kapiti Coast, the terrain of her trilogy The High Jump. Knox was a student of Bill Manhire’s creative writing class in 1986 and her first novel After Z-Hour was published in 1987. In 1988 she was part of the group that founded the literary magazine Sport. Knox has written novels, novellas, young adult fiction and essays. Her novel The Vintner’s Luck (1998) was an international success, has been widely translated, and was made into a film directed by Niki Caro (2009).

  Reweti T. [Tuhorouta] Kohere (1871–1954), Ngāti Porou, was born in Orutua near East Cape. When he was sixteen, he entered Te Aute College. There he excelled academically and made friends with a group of fellow students with whom he founded the Te Aute College Students’ Association and in 1909 the Young Maori Party. Kohere taught at Te Aute for a time, and then went to Canterbury University College although he did not complete his degree,
leaving to teach at Te Rau Theological College in Gisborne. In 1899 he became the editor of the Māori newspaper Te Pipiwharauroa where he argued against dropping the Māori language from the school curriculum and in favour of practical manual education for Māori children. He was the Anglican vicar at Te Araroa, a farmer, a contributor to both the Māori and the Pākehā press, and a translator of the English poetic canon into Māori.

  Pat [Patrick Anthony] Lawlor (1893–1979) was born into an Irish Catholic family and educated in Wellington. He worked as a journalist in a wide variety of newspapers around New Zealand and in Australia and was active in a number of organisations that supported writing and writers. He is significant for his collections of reminiscences of early twentieth-century Wellington rather than his two, less successful, novels written in the 1930s.

  Henry Lawson (1867–1922), Australian short-story writer and poet, came to New Zealand in 1897 with his wife who wished to wean her husband away from the dissolute habits of his life in Sydney. They settled in Mangamāunu in the South Island, Lawson taking on the job of teacher at the local Native School. This forms the basis of his story ‘A Daughter of Maoriland’ (1897). He was not a success, and the couple left at the end of the year, staying in Wellington only until their first child was born in March 1898 and then returning to Sydney.

  John A. [Alfred Alexander] Lee (1891–1982) was born in Dunedin to a Scottish Gipsy family. He grew up in severe poverty after his father left, as recorded in his first and most famous novel Children of the Poor (1934). Lee had little education although he was a voracious reader. He worked as a labourer and farm worker, and served some time in borstal and later in Mt Eden prison. He enlisted at the beginning of the First World War and was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. On his return he became active in the Labour Party, being particularly concerned with the plight of returned soldiers. He was elected to Parliament in 1922 but his radicalism put him increasingly at odds with the Labour hierarchy of Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage. Despite Lee’s majority in the 1938 election being the largest in New Zealand history, he was expelled from the party in 1940, two days before Savage died. An attempt to form an alternative party was unsuccessful but Lee’s steady output of journalism, fiction and non-fiction, including his autobiography Simple on a Soapbox (1963), made him a popular figure with a wide audience throughout his final decades.

  Michele Leggott (1956–) was born in Stratford, Taranaki. She was educated at the Universities of Canterbury and British Columbia, where she gained a PhD with a thesis on the work of the poet Louis Zukofsky. She is a professor of English at Auckland University, coordinator of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre and editor of the poetry of Robin Hyde. She was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2007 to 2009.

  Len [Leonard Charles Huia] Lye (1901–80) was born in Christchurch, and had an unsettled childhood after the death of his father. He and his mother settled in Wellington and he attended Wellington Technical College, first taking commercial subjects, later moving to art. He was influenced by Māori and Pacific art as well as by modernist movements such as Futurism and artists like Gaudier-Brzeska and Brancusi. Lye lived in Sāmoa from 1924 to 1925 and in 1926 arrived in London. Reviews of his work there described him as the ‘Futurist New Zealander’. He moved to New York in 1944 and remained there, working with painting, sculpture and film.

  Jessie Mackay (1864–1938) was born in the Rakaia Gorge, the daughter of Scottish immigrants. She trained as a teacher but was forced to give up the profession because of ill health, after which she, and a number of her family members, relied on her journalism for an income. She had a column in the Otago Witness, was the ‘lady editor’ of the Canterbury Times and contributed to a number of suffrage publications in New Zealand and in Britain. She was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the National Council of Women. Her poetry combines her radical political positions—suffrage, home rule for Scotland and Ireland, labour reform, Māori self-determination—with a deep sense of her Scottish literary heritage. Often cited as New Zealand’s first locally born (Pākehā) poet, she was enormously popular in her lifetime, though scorned by Curnow in his 1960 anthology where he describes her verse as ‘graceless botching of Scots and English locutions’.

  Tina Makereti (1973–), of Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Ati Āwa, Ngāti Maniapoto, Moriori and Pākehā descent, lives on the Kapiti Coast, north of Wellington, and is completing a PhD in creative writing at Victoria University. Her first collection of short stories, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa, was published in 2010.

  John Male (1913–2003) was born in Auckland, went to Auckland University College and worked as a reporter for various provincial newspapers and for the Radio Record (later renamed the Listener). He was a friend of A.R.D. Fairburn. During the Second World War Male served in the army in Italy and North Africa. His experiences are the subject of poems he sent home which were published in New Zealand New Writing but his only collection of poetry was not published until 1989. After the war Male worked for the charity CORSO and for the United Nations, and was a founder of the New Zealand Foundation for Peace Studies.

  Jane Mander (1877–1949) was born in Ramarama, south of Auckland. She worked as a teacher and was a sub-editor and reporter for Whāngārei newspaper the Northern Advocate, which her father had bought in 1902. In 1912 she moved to New York and enrolled in the journalism school of Columbia University, though she did not graduate. During the First World War she worked for the US Red Cross and finished her best-known work The Story of a New Zealand River (1920). In 1925 Mander moved to London where she continued to write novels, contributed to newspapers and magazines both in England and New Zealand and worked for a publishing house. In 1932 she returned to New Zealand to care for her elderly parents. She did not produce any more novels, although she continued to write for newspapers, gave radio talks, was active in organisations which supported writers, and cultivated a circle of literary friends.

  Bill Manhire (1946–), poet, teacher, academic, anthologist, was born in Invercargill, where his father was a publican, an upbringing he writes about in his 2003 essay Under the Influence. Manhire studied English at Otago University and University College, London, and since 1973 has taught at Victoria University where his creative writing programme has been a transformational force in New Zealand writing. He was appointed the first New Zealand Poet Laureate in 1996.

  F.E. [Frederick Edward] Maning (1811/12–83) was born in Dublin to a wealthy Protestant family who immigrated to Tasmania in 1832. In 1833 Maning moved to New Zealand, settling in the Hokianga. From 1839 he lived in Onoke with Moengaroa of Te Hikutu. They had four children. He was an opponent of the Treaty of Waitangi, fearing that it would restrict opportunities for land purchase and augment the influence of the missionaries, and he had a particular antipathy to Governor George Grey. From the late 1840s Maning was active in the timber and gum trade. His history of the northern wars (begun in 1845 but not published until 1862) and the fancifully autobiographical Old New Zealand exhibit sympathy for Māori although he viewed them as part of the past rather than the future of the colony. From 1880 he lived in Auckland, and he died on a trip to England in 1883.

  Katherine Mansfield [pseud. of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp] (1888–1923) was born in Thorndon, Wellington. Her father was an up and coming businessman who in 1903 sent his daughters to the progressive London school Queen’s College. In 1906 Mansfield returned to New Zealand but, despite some success in publishing her work locally and in Australia, and the excitement of a trip through the Urewera district, she agitated to be allowed to return to England. She got her wish in 1908, although her initial experiences—of unplanned pregnancy, miscarriage and a one-day marriage—seemed to justify her parents’ apprehensions. In 1911 she met John Middleton Murry, editor of the journal Rhythm, whom she married in 1918. From 1910 onwards her short stories appeared in a number of periodicals—New Age, Rhythm, the Blue Review. Mansfield and Murry had an intense friendship with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda, depict
ed in Lawrence’s novel Women in Love (1920). The death of Mansfield’s brother Lesley in 1915 led to her writing Prelude (1918), a recreation of her Wellington childhood. From 1917 she was increasingly affected by tuberculosis, living abroad, often in the company of her devoted but irritating friend Ida Baker. In October 1922 she entered the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man run by the mystic G.I. Gurdjeff in Fontainebleau-Avon near Paris, where she died in early 1923. She left contradictory instructions for the disposal of her papers and unpublished work which Murry fully exploited.

  Owen Marshall [pseud. of Owen Marshall Jones] (1941–) grew up in provincial areas of the South Island, studied history at Canterbury University and taught in secondary schools. In the 1990s he left teaching but occasionally teaches creative writing. He is the author of novels, short stories, anthologies and essays in a range of genres from psychological realism to science fiction and the historical novel.

  Bruce Mason (1921–82) was born in Wellington but his family moved to Takapuna when he was five. He worked as a law clerk and trained as a teacher before serving in the Second World War. After the war his occupations were varied. He wrote for newspapers, the radio and the Listener, and from 1960 to 1961 was editor of Te Ao Hou. During this time he was writing and producing his own plays, often for Wellington’s left-wing Unity Theatre. Between 1959 and 1962 he toured his solo play The End of the Golden Weather, set on the Takapuna beach of his childhood. A generation of New Zealanders remember these performances as their only experience of professional live theatre. A cycle of five plays written in the 1970s looks back to his 1957 play The Pohutukawa Tree and was an early and influential expression of bicultural literary forms.