Maurice Gee ― Life and Work

Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand’s greatest fiction writers. His long literary career began in the 1950s and includes seventeen adult novels, thirteen novels for children, a short story collection, and screenplays for television and film. His work is loved by generations of readers and has earned him many awards. In this revelatory new work, acclaimed biographer Rachel Barrowman interweaves the story of Gee’s life with his fiction, illuminating the unassuming ‘man in the grey cardy’ alongside his unsettling stories. Immaculately researched, with full access to her subject and his records,Maurice Gee: Life and Work offers a fascinating portrait of a writing life. Gee once described himself as ‘a New-Zealandy sort of writer living in a New-Zealandy sort of place .?.?. writing New-Zealandy sort of books’. His work has always drawn from a particular, personal New Zealand; his fictional territory takes in the domestic lives and landscapes of New Zealand’s provincial towns and middle-class suburbs—places where murders happen, where families hurt and self-destruct. Through decades of changing literary fashions, Gee has gone on doing his own thing, seeking out ‘evidence of disorder, passion, of the primitive thing’.Maurice Gee: Life and Work explores the connections and paradoxes of a private man who has written his life into fiction. It is a compelling story of a life and a major contribution to New Zealand literary history.

Rachel Barrowman is a biographer and historian. Her books include Mason: The Life of R.A.K. Mason, which won the 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Biography and Memoir.