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Profile
Vince Ford’s writing career started at the age of 22 when “the
desire to do it became more urgent than the excuses not to.” The result
several years later was the award-winning 2MUCH4U, swiftly followed
the next year by It’s A Try! Ford has maintained a steady output
of new works ever since.
Selected published works
2MUCH4U,1999; Tom Fitzgibbon Memorial Award, Junior Fiction
and Best First Book at 2000 New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards; It’s
A Try!, 2000; SOMUCH2DO, 2002; POSSUMS2U, 2002; A Handful
of Blue, 2003, Boyznbikes, 2006, and Scorched Bone: Chronicles of Stone #1, 2008; Set in Stone: Chronicles of Stone #2, 2008.
Publishers
Scholastic New Zealand Limited
www.scholastic.co.nz
Biography
Vince Ford was born in 1970 and grew up on a farm with two brothers and
a sister, and four cousins who lived just down the road. The Ford kids made
up a quarter of the school population and their playground was the family’s
300-hectare hill country farm in Taranaki. Ford went to boarding school, then
did an agriculture degree at Massey University, but always thought that he’d
like to write one day.
While working in Australia as a truck driver and a sheep mustering jackaroo,
Ford did a correspondence course in writing. Then, back in New Zealand he took
a one-year writing course at Whitireia Polytechnic in Wellington. Following
a three-year period as production manager for a business that made agricultural
videos, Ford finally had the courage to become a full-time writer.
Ford favours small-town settings, and brings them alive for his readers. Like
the best children’s writers, he deals with big issues in the lives of
young people, such as bullying and the “tall poppy syndrome”.
Vince Ford represented New Zealand at the 2001 International Writing Programme,
a three-month writers’ residency at the University of Iowa in the United
States. In 2004, he travelled to Melbourne as a participant in the New Zealand
Book Council’s International Writers’ Exchange programme.
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