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Profile
Margaret Mahy is one of the world’s most original and imaginative
children’s writers. Her lively and creative use of language, exciting
and often suspenseful tales, sense of humour and complex characterisation, shot
through with a dash of the unexpected, make all her works unforgettable.
Selected published works
A Lion in the Meadow, 1969, Esther Glen Medal; The Haunting,
1982, Esther Glen Medal, Carnegie Medal; The Changeover, 1984,
Esther Glen Medal, Carnegie Medal; The Catalogue of the Universe, 1985;
The Tricksters, 1986, Young Observer Fiction Prize; A Dissolving
Ghost, 2000; Alchemy, 2002, New Zealand Post Children’s Book
Awards 2003; Maddigan’s Quest, 2005 (novel and television drama
series); Kaitangata Twitch, 2005; Portable Ghosts, 2006; Down the Back of the Chair, 2006; The Magician of Hoad, 2008.
Biography
Margaret Mahy, the eldest of five children, was born in 1936 and raised
in Whakatāne. Her first publications were at the age of seven, in the children’s
page of the local newspaper. Mahy gained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1955 and
the following year entered the New Zealand Library School in Wellington where,
upon graduation, she began a long career as a librarian. She was appointed Children’s
Librarian at the Canterbury Public Library in 1976, a position she held until
she resigned in 1980 to become a full-time writer.
Mahy is a towering literary talent, which was recognised in 2006 when she won
the world’s premier prize for children’s writing, the Hans Christian
Andersen Award. She has produced a phenomenal body of work: more than 100 picture
books, more than 200 stories for the international educational market, many
novels for children and for young adults, anthologies of stories and poetry,
and plays for stage and television, both for adults and children. Mahy’s
work has been adapted for film and television,both for adults and children.
Mahy’s work has been adapted for film and television, and translated into
more than 15 languages.
She has won Britain’s Carnegie Medal twice (1982, 1984), the Arbuthnot
Lecture Award (1989), multiple awards in New Zealand, England, Italy and Holland,
and inclusion in prestigious listings complied by United States journal editors,
librarians and educationalists. She has been in constant demand as a speaker
at international conferences since 1980, and a collection of her major speeches
was published as A Dissolving Ghost (Victoria University Press) in
2000.
In 1993, Mahy’s contribution to literature was rewarded with New Zealand’s
highest civil honour, the Order of New Zealand, and in the same year, she received
an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Canterbury. She was the first recipient
of the A.W. Reed Lifetime Achievement Award given by the New Zealand publishing
industry in 1997, and has lent her name to the Margaret Mahy Medal and Lecture
Award bestowed by the New Zealand Children’s Literature Foundation. In
2002, she was awarded Auckland College of Education’s inaugural Sylvia
Ashton-Warner Fellowship. In 2005, Mahy’s contribution to New Zealand
literature was recognised when the Arts Foundation of New Zealand installed
her as a Living Icon. She was also presented the Prime Minister’s Award
for Literary Achievement in Fiction.
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