Tessa Duder

Profile
Tessa Duder is one of New Zealand’s leading writers for children and young adults. She has won many awards for her work, in particular for the Alex quartet, and was the first children’s writer to be honoured with the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellowship.

Selected published works
Alex, 1987, Aim Children’s Book of the Year Award, Esther Glen Medal Alex in Winter, 1989 Aim Children’s Book of the Year Award, Esther Glen Medal Alessandra – Alex in Rome, 1991, Aim Children’s Book of the Year Award, Esther Glen Medal Songs for Alex, 1992, Aim Children’s Book of the Year Award The Tiggie Thompson Show, 1999, senior fiction category,1999 New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards

Agent Ray Richards PO Box 31240 Milford Auckland rla.richards@clear.net.nz

Publishers Penguin Books New Zealand www.penguin.co.nz

Biography
Tessa Duder was born in Auckland in 1940. She was an accomplished swimmer, a silver medallist at the 1958 Cardiff Empire Games, national butterfly and medley record holder (1958–59) and the first New Zealand Swimmer of the Year in 1959. She began a career in journalism at the Auckland Star in 1959. After she married in 1964 she spent several years overseas in England and Pakistan, returning in 1971. She published her first book, Night Race to Kawau, in 1982, and in 1985 she was awarded the Choysa Bursary for Children’s Writers.

Duder has also edited various anthologies, and her non-fiction includes a collection of sea stories from well known New Zealanders and In Search of Eliza Marchetti, the story of Duder’s search for her Italian roots.

It has been observed that Duder’s writing typically features “strong female characters, an identifiably New Zealand setting, convincing New Zealand English dialogue and a strongly dramatic plot”.

Each of the books in the critically acclaimed Alex quartet of novels, about a young New Zealand swimmer, have won awards. They are among the best-loved New Zealand books for young adults, and have been published in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia and translated into several languages.

Duder’s next series of books was the Tiggie trilogy, which included The Tiggie Thompson Show (1999), Tiggie Thompson All at Sea (2001) and Tiggie Thompson’s Longest Journey (2003).

Duder was the first children’s writer to be awarded the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in 2003. Her other awards include the University of Waikato Writing Fellowship in 1991, an Order of the British Empire in 1994 and the Margaret Mahy Lecture Award (the New Zealand Children’s Book Foundation’s recognition of distinction) in 1996. Duder was also instrumental in setting up and promoting the New Zealand Children’s Book Foundation. She visits schools all over New Zealand under the Writers-in-Schools scheme and, occasionally, Australia.