Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Arts & Music
It took a hundred years for post-colonial New Zealand to develop its own
distinctive artistic identity. In the first half of the 20th century it was writers
and visual artists who led the charge. By the 1970s NZ pub rockers had
conquered Australia, while in the 1980s, indie music obsessives the world
over hooked into Dunedin's weird and wonderful alternative scene.
However, it took the success of the film industry in the 1990s to catapult the
nation's creativity into the global consciousness.
Literature
In 2013 New Zealanders rejoiced to hear that 28-year-old Eleanor Catton had become
only the second NZ writer to ever win the Man Booker Prize, arguably the world's most
prestigious award for literature. Lloyd Jones had come close in 2007 when his novel
Mister Pip
was shortlisted, but it had been a long wait between drinks since Keri Hulme
took the prize in 1985. Interestingly, both Catton's epic historical novel
The Luminaries
and Hulme's haunting
The Bone People
were set on the numinous West Coast of the South
Island - both books capturing something of the raw and mysterious essence of the land-
scape.
Catton and Hulme continue in a proud line of NZ women writers, starting in the early
20th century with Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield's work began a Kiwi tradition in short
fiction, and for years the standard was carried by novelist Janet Frame, whose dramatic
life was depicted in Jane Campion's film of her autobiography,
An Angel at My Table
.
Frame's novel
The Carpathians
won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989.
Less recognised internationally, Maurice Gee has gained the nation's annual top fiction
gong six times, most recently with
Blindsight
(2005). His much-loved children's novel
Under the Mountain
(1979) was made into a seminal NZ TV series in 1981 and then a ma-
jor motion picture in 2009. In 2004 the adaptation of another of his novels,
In My Father's
Den
(1972), won major awards at international film festivals and is one of the country's
highest-grossing films.
Maurice is an auspicious name for NZ writers, with the late Maurice Shadbolt achiev-
ing much acclaim for his many novels, particularly those set during the NZ Wars. Try
Season of the Jew
(1987) or
The House of Strife
(1993).
