New Zealand writers: resources for schools
Up close and personal
Interviews
Want to see a writer live in action, but can’t get them to your school? Here’s something we prepared earlier . . . click here for a selection of video and audio interviews with New Zealand writers.
Authors under the spotlight
We’ve put two of our favourite authors under the spotlight to tell us more about their work.
Click their names to read more information in their Book Council Writer Files.
Helen Beaglehole
writer, profile published in BRAT, Autumn 2001
Writing's a peculiar business. Good writing, I think, only comes out of material that fascinates you, and grips you, and moves you, and whose characters live in your head, adding new perspectives to all sorts of things in your own life - yet you're seeking to communicate this to a wider public whom for the most part you know only in terms of broad generalisations and from whom you rarely hear.
So school visits give you an opportunity to get some audience feedback. But perhaps more importantly, if I can leave students (and I write for all ages) knowing that writing (structuring experience) is tremendous fun and allows the writer and the reader to explore all sorts of experiences in all sorts of unexpected ways, then that's when they're really successful.
Ben Brown
picture book writer, profile published in The School Library Issue 1, March 2009
For a while when I was young, I never read books. I grew up as a boy on a farm by a river and there was, so I thought, too much else to do. My father was a prolific reader and he was always on at me to read. He'd say things to me like, 'There’s a whole world in a book, son,' but I was far too busy gallivanting and skylarking and otherwise having fun. Until one day when he threw a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at me and firmly ordered me to 'Read it!'
Now it was a hardcover volume and I was a lousy catch, and the book sconed me on the noggin (my father was a very good shot), but I read it nonetheless ... and I was hooked. My father was right. Here was a book about a boy who, like me, lived by a river, but his world was a new and wondrous place peopled with strange and exotic characters who spoke and thought in ways that I had not even imagined. Here is the essence of writing for me, and it is what I most enjoy talking about when I visit schools.
And wouldn't you know, at the end of the day, I still had time for gallivanting.
Our Writers in Schools authors
Click on a region or letter below or use the box to search for authors who visit schools through our Writers in Schools programme. You can click on a name in the search results to visit the author’s Book Council Writer File, full of information about their life and work.
Can't find the author you’re looking for? It may be they are not currently on our Writers in Schools programme. You can search for information about more New Zealand writers from our Authors home page.
