Sarah Gaitanos
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gaitanos, Sarah ( - ) is a biographer and oral historian. Having combined teaching and freelance journalism in the 1980s, Sarah has worked primarily as a writer since 1992, moving gradually from journalism to longer works of non-fiction.
As a journalist, Gaitanos has written feature articles on a wide range of subjects in New Zealand’s main daily papers and magazines, including New Zealand Listener, North and South, Sunday Star-Times, NZ Woman’s Weekly, Architecture New Zealand, Landscape New Zealand, Urbis and many others.
She has received several awards and research grants in her career, including the New Zealand History Research Trust Fund Award in History in 2001 and Awards in Oral History from the Sesquicentennial Gift Trust in 1995 and 2002. For her non-fiction projects, she received the Todd Writer’s Bursary in 2008 and the Claude McCarthy Fellowship in 2009.
Her first book publications were children’s readers, for the ‘Foundations’ series by Lands End Publishing Ltd – Hair, The Monarch Butterfly, and The River (1996). Gaitanos also had a short story featured in 100 NZ Short Short Stories, edited by Graeme Lay (Tandem Press, 1997).
In 2006, Gaitanos published Nola Millar: A Theatrical Life (Victoria University Press), for which she received a Creative New Zealand Grant in 2003. The book is described by Roger Hall as ‘a brilliant biography … put together in a highly readable way...’ (NZ Listener, 20 January 2007). Michael Nicolaidi says in New Zealand Books, ‘Her meticulous account of the theatrical life and times of Wellington…viewed through the prism of Millar’s emergence as persistent, unflagging theatre director and teacher, is social history at its best.’ (Summer 2007)
This was followed in 2010 by Crisis: One Central Bank Governor & the Global Financial Collapse (Auckland University Press), written in cooperation with Alan Bollard. It was reviewed very favourably, with The Nelson Mail stating ‘Sarah Gaitanos has put human dialogue over the financial rhetoric and made the book accessible to those with no banking, economic or financial background.’ (18 September 2010). Brian Easton also calls it ‘a damned good read’ in NZ Listener (18 September 2010).
Gaitanos published The Violinist: Clare Galambos Winter, Holocaust Survivor (Victoria University Press) in 2011. This book tells the story of the holocaust from the eyes of a Jewish woman who survived concentration camps to emigrate and make a new life in New Zealand. The Sunday-Star Times reviewer Cheryl Pearl Sucher says Gaitanos ‘verified the cloud of memory with her stellar research, placing Winter's oral recollections in the context of recorded history. ... this is a powerful, galloping read.’ In The Dominion Post, Rosa Sheils says ‘What remains with the reader after the last chapter, however, is not an overflow of grim and ghastly images burnt on the mind's eye, but the joyous smile of a woman - representative, fortunately, of many brave others - who triumphed over evil.’
Gaitanos and Winter were acknowledged by the Human Rights Commission in February 2011 for Positive Contributions to Race Relations.
(Entry last updated, 3 May 2011)
MEDIA LINKS AND CLIPS
- Sarah Gaitanos' website
- Sarah Gaitanos' website at Victoria University
- Sarah Gaitanos and Clare Galambos Winters on Good Morning
