New Zealand literature is literature, both oral and written, produced by the people of New Zealand. It often deals with New Zealand themes, people or places, is written predominantly in New Zealand English, and features Māori culture and the use of the Māori language. Before the arrival and settlement of Europeans in New Zealand in the 19th century, Māori culture had a strong oral tradition. Early European settlers wrote about their experiences travelling and exploring New Zealand. The concept of a "New Zealand literature", as distinct from English literature, did not originate until the 20th century, when authors began exploring themes of landscape, isolation, and the emerging New Zealand national identity. Māori writers became more prominent in the latter half of the 20th century, and Māori language and culture have become an increasingly important part of New Zealand literature.
Janet Paterson Frame was a New Zealand author. She is internationally renowned for her work, which includes novels, short stories, poetry, juvenile fiction, and an autobiography, and received numerous awards including being appointed to the Order of New Zealand, New Zealand's highest civil honour.
Maurice Gough Gee is a New Zealand novelist. He is one of New Zealand's most distinguished and prolific authors, having written over thirty novels for adults and children, and has won numerous awards both in New Zealand and overseas, including multiple top prizes at the New Zealand Book Awards, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the UK, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, the Robert Burns Fellowship and a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. In 2003 he was recognised as one of New Zealand's greatest living artists across all disciplines by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, which presented him with an Icon Award.
Margaret Mahy was a New Zealand author of children's and young adult books. Many of her story plots have strong supernatural elements but her writing concentrates on the themes of human relationships and growing up. She wrote more than 100 picture books, 40 novels and 20 collections of short stories. At her death she was one of thirty writers to win the biennial, international Hans Christian Andersen Medal for her "lasting contribution to children's literature".
Witi Tame Ihimaera-Smiler is a New Zealand author. Raised in the small town of Waituhi, he decided to become a writer as a teenager after being convinced that Māori people were ignored or mischaracterised in literature. He was the first Māori writer to publish a collection of short stories, with Pounamu, Pounamu (1972), and the first to publish a novel, with Tangi (1973). After his early works he took a ten-year break from writing, during which he focused on editing an anthology of Māori writing in English.
Patricia Frances Grace is a New Zealand Māori writer of novels, short stories, and children's books. She began writing as a young adult, while working as a teacher. Her early short stories were published in magazines, leading to her becoming the first female Māori writer to publish a collection of short stories, Waiariki, in 1975. Her first novel, Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps, followed in 1978.
William Manhire is a New Zealand poet, short story writer, emeritus professor, and New Zealand's inaugural Poet Laureate (1997–1998). He founded New Zealand's first creative writing course at Victoria University of Wellington in 1975, founded the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2001, and has been a strong promoter of New Zealand literature and poetry throughout his career. Many of New Zealand's leading writers graduated from his courses at Victoria. He has received many notable awards including a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in 2007 and an Arts Foundation Icon Award in 2018.
James Christopher Belich is a New Zealand historian, known for his work on the New Zealand Wars and on New Zealand history more generally. One of his major works on the 19th-century clash between Māori and Pākehā, the revisionist study The New Zealand Wars (1986), was also published in an American edition and adapted into a television series and DVD.
Albert Tuaopepe Wendt is a Samoan poet and writer who lives in New Zealand. He is one of the most influential writers in Oceania. His notable works include Sons for the Return Home, published in 1973, and Leaves of the Banyan Tree, published in 1979. As an academic he has taught at universities in Samoa, Fiji, Hawaii and New Zealand, and from 1988 to 2008 was the professor of New Zealand literature at the University of Auckland.
John Dunmore was a French-born New Zealand academic, historian, author, playwright, and publisher.
Andrew Johnston is a New Zealand poet and journalist who lives in Paris.
Richard Dennis McEldowney was a New Zealand author and publisher. His best known work was The World Regained. Auto-biographical in nature, it described how he dealt with being an invalid due to having a Tetralogy of Fallot. This book won McEldowney the 1958 Hubert Church Memorial Prize.
Sir Vincent Gerard O'Sullivan is one of New Zealand's best-known writers. He is a poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, critic, editor, biographer, and librettist.
Renée Gertrude Taylor, known mononymously as Renée, is a New Zealand feminist writer and playwright. Renée is of Māori, Irish, English, and Scottish ancestry, and has described herself as a "lesbian feminist with socialist working-class ideals". She wrote her first play, Setting the Table, in 1981. Many of her plays have been published, with extracts included in Intimate Acts, a collection of lesbian plays published by Brito and Lair, New York.
Sir James Henry Peter McNeish was a New Zealand novelist, playwright and biographer.
Philippa Jane Ussher is one of New Zealand's foremost documentary and portrait photographers. She joined the New Zealand Listener in 1977 and was chief photographer for 29 years, leaving to take up a career as a freelance photographer and author.
Sue McCauley is a New Zealand novelist, short story writer, playwright, journalist and screenwriter.
Sarah Broom (1972–2013) was a New Zealand poet, Oxford graduate, university lecturer and mother of three children. Her work included two books of poetry, Tigers at Awhitu and Gleam. After her early death from lung cancer, the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize, was established to remember and celebrate her life and work.
Michael Harlow is a poet, publisher, editor and librettist. A recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (1986) and the University of Otago Robert Burns Fellowship (2009), he has twice been a poetry finalist in the New Zealand Book Awards. In 2018 he was awarded the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement, alongside playwright Renée and critic and curator Wystan Curnow Harlow has published 12 books of poetry and one book on writing poetry.
John Millen Lasenby, commonly known as Jack Lasenby, was a New Zealand writer. He wrote over 30 books for children and young adults, many of which were shortlisted for or won prizes. He was also the recipient of numerous awards including the Margaret Mahy Medal and Lecture Award in 2003 and the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement for Fiction in 2014.
