New Zealand Writers
NORCLIFFE, James
An ‘absurdist’s grab-bag of whatever is bumped up against that can be made to reveal the sheer numinous strangeness of existence.'
Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). About the Companion entries View list of Companion contributors
NORCLIFFE, James (1946– ), poet and fiction writer, has taught English in Christchurch, China and Brunei.
He followed his debut collection of poetry, The Sportsman and Other Poems (1986), with the successful Letters to Dr Dee and Other Poems (1993), which was shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards 1994.
Described byDavid *Eggleton as an ‘Absurdist’s grab-bag of whatever is bumped up against that can be made to reveal the sheer numinous strangeness of existence, imagist-style’, the collection contains traces of *China in ‘a distilled Taoist influence’ and poems that are ‘fine-spun, like silk screens, or else transparent, like rice-paper’ (*Quote Unquote, Apr. 1994).
China also features in The Chinese Interpreter (1993), short stories based on cultural clashes Norcliffe observed while teaching English at Nankai University. These lucid, keenly observed narratives have proved popular on radio.
Equally popular have been four novels for young adults: Under the Rotunda (1991) employs the powerful magic of an old cornet to restore to normal a brass band maliciously reduced to the size of carrots; Penguin Bay (1993) recounts the scary adventures of children holidaying in an old house on Banks Peninsula; The Emerald Encyclopaedia (1994)—honour award recipient at the 1995 Aim Children’s Book Awards—a fantasy based in Christchurch that explores the manipulation of peoples’ minds by those wanting control of the masses; and The Carousel Experiment (1995) chronicles a boy’s search for his mother in the enigmatic Carousel Caravan Park.
Norcliffe has won awards including the Lilian Ida Smith Award 1990 and the *NZ Poetry Society’s international competition 1992.
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Updated Information
A Kind of Kingdom (1998)
In 2000 James Norcliffe was the Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University.
The poems in Rat Tickling (2003) are described by Alan Riach in Landfall as being surrounded by an "atmosphere of summer lightning ... they act as tilted mirrors, sharp-edged postcards, or glimpsed moments, taste and textures...."
Double Jointed by Jenny Powell-Chalmers (2003) features poetry by the author with Rob Allan, Martha Morseth, John Allison, Larry Matthews, Emma Neale, John Dolan, Peter Olds, Claire Beynon, Trevor Reeves and James Norcliffe.
In 2003 Norcliffe, with Bernadette Hall was Awarded the inaugural Christchurch Press Literary Liaisons Honour Award for “lasting contribution to literature in the South Island.”
Along Blueskin Road (2005), Canterbury University Press.
Norcliffe was President of the NZ Poetry Society 2005 - 2007, and became Vice-President in 2007.
Norcliffe also participated in the Tasmanian Writers’ Island of Residencies programme in 2006, residing at the Hobart Writer’s Cottage. Norcliffe spent a month in Hobart in July working on projects, holding a writing workshop and giving readings of his own work.
Norcliffe won the 2006 Fellowship at the University of Iowa as a participant in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Programme, and Residency in Nebraska at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Centre, Nebraska City.
The Assassin of Gleam (2006), Hazard Press
The Assassin of Gleam was awarded The Sir Julius Vogel Award 2007 for the best science fiction / fantasy novel published in New Zealand in 2006
2007 saw the publication of his sixth collection of poetry, Villon in Millerton (Auckland University Press)
Tennis with Raw Eggs, the sixth in the Re-draft series by the Christchurch School of Young Writers Inc., was edited by Norcliffe and Alan Bunn.
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