Our Reading Doctor is back!

We introduced this service last year and we welcome your questions again in 2021.

Read more about Dr Louise here. Send us your questions for her by emailing us: communications@read-nz.org

Find the complete list of 2020 Reading Doctor prescriptions here.

I’m interested in the lives of New Zealand writers. Can you recommend some good biographies, autobiographies or memoirs?

Without entering the murky distinctions between biography and history, memoir, autobiography and creative non-fiction, I offer these books as a way into imagining and understanding the lives of significant figures in our literary and cultural history.

· Sarah Laing sets her own life as a writer against Katherine Mansfield’s dramatic, sometimes tortured, career in Mansfield and Me: A Graphic Memoir.

· The first volume of Witi Ihimaera’s memoir is Māori Boy: A Memoir of Childhood, in which it becomes apparent that his formative experiences in real life have both shaped him as a writer, and have also directly inspired his fiction.

· Perhaps the most famous New Zealand writer you’ve never heard of is Greville Texidor, variously a Bloomsbury insider, a chorus-line dancer, an addict and an anarchist, who began writing after her arrival in New Zealand as a refugee in 1940: Margot Schwass’ recent biography, All the Juicy Pastures, tells of her extraordinary life.

· Writer Elspeth Sandys’ travelogue of her trip to China to mark the 90^th anniversary of her cousin’s arrival in Shanghai in A Communist in the Family: Searching for Rewi Alley is also a memoir and a literary commentary, intertwining the stories of the subject and the author.

· Stephanie Johnson looks to the West Island of New Zealand to examine the lives of five 20^th-century New Zealand writers and artists who chose to make their lives in Australia, reconsidering their place in our national narrative.

· My Father’s Island is Adam Dudding’s poignantly balanced memoir of his complex father, Robin Dudding, the most influential literary editor of his generation; it’s a social and cultural history, as well as the portrait of a marriage, with cameo appearances from iconic literary figures.

· A collaboration between writer Paula Morris and photographer Haru Sameshima, Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde examines three locations important to the work of this ground-breaking writer: poet, fiction-writer, journalist and war correspondent.

· Small and perfectly formed is Albert Wendt’s BWB text Out of the Vaipe, the Deadwater: A Writer’s Early Life, in which he recounts a childhood split between Samoa and New Zealand, while casting into doubt the notion of autobiographical truth.

· Janet Frame’s three-volume autobiography, beginning with To the Is-land, deserves its reputation as astounding, in both form and subject: she was born in Dunedin to a working-class family which prized intellect, was misdiagnosed as mentally ill, enduring horrific hospitalisations and barbaric treatment, won international acclaim, travelled widely and shunned publicity.

· Defying the boundaries of genre, Fiona Farrell draws on then exceeds her personal experiences of the devastating Christchurch earthquakes in her two volume work examining the rebuilding of a city, through the twinned lenses of non-fiction (The Villa at the Edge of the Empire) and fiction (Decline and Fall on Savage Street).