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Profile
Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand’s finest fiction writers, a novelist
who never fails to produce work of the very highest quality.
Gee has won more book awards than any other New Zealand writer, in both adult
and children’s fiction.
Selected published works
Under the Mountain, 1975; The Fat Man 1995, Aim Children’s Book of the
Year Award 1995; The O Trilogy: The Halfmen of O, 1982, The Priests of Ferris, 1984, and Motherstone, 1985; The Champion, 1989; Orchard Street, 1998; Hostel Girl, 1999; Salt, 2007, Young Adult Fiction winner, New Zealand Post Childrens Book Awards 2008; Gool, 2008.
Maurice Gee's adult fiction can be found here.
Biography
Born in Whakatāne in 1931, Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand’s
best-known writers, both for adults and children. He has won many literary awards,
including the Wattie Book Award (twice), the Deutz Medal for fiction in the
Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the New Zealand Book Award for fiction (four
times). He has also won the Children’s Book of the Year Award. In 2004
Gee received an Honorary Doctorate in literature from the University of Auckland
and he was among ten of New Zealand’s greatest living artists named as
Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon Artists in 2003. In 2004, he received the
Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Fiction.
According to Gee’s entry in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature
(1998): “Each of Gee’s novels bountifully gives us a rich vision
of some region and aspect of New Zealand life, and of human life in general.
Each is peopled with a variety of intensely living and unique personalities
together with lush images of the natural and social worlds.”
Gee’s early novels include The Big Season (1962), In My
Father’s Den – made into a feature film in a joint New Zealand-British
production – Games of Choice (1976) and Plumb. Gee’s
brilliantly drawn, intolerant, irascible clergyman, George Plumb, is regarded
as one of New Zealand’s most memorable fictional characters. One of Gee’s
personal favourites is Prowlers, which features (as many of his novels
do) an elderly man looking back on his life.
In the past two decades Gee has produced some of the best novels written in
New Zealand, including: The Burning Boy (1990), Going West
(winner of the Wattie Book Award), Crime Story (also made into a feature
film, Fracture), Live Bodies (winner of the Deutz Medal for
fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards), Ellie and the Shadow Man
(2002), The Scornful Moon (joint runner-up for the Deutz Medal in 2004)
and Blindsight (2005). Gee has also produced a highly acclaimed book
of short stories, originally published in 1975 as A Glorious Morning, Comrade
and now in print as Collected Stories (1986).
Maurice Gee is also a highly regarded author of books for children. His novel
Under the Mountain (1979) and the fantasy series consisting of Motherstone
(1985), The Priests of Ferris (1984) and The Halfmen of O
(1982) are New Zealand classics. In 2002 Gee was honoured by the Children’s
Literature Foundation with the Margaret Mahy Medal and Lecture Award for his
long-term contribution to children’s literature and literacy.
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