Alan Duff

Profile
Alan Duff has published six novels, a novella and three non-fiction works. Once Were Warriors won the Hubert Church PEN Best First Book Award for Fiction and was made into an internationally acclaimed film. The sequel to that novel, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? was also made into a feature film, with Duff himself writing the original screenplay. These films had an extraordinary impact. They showed the reality of life in a section of Māori society. Duff’s portrayal of abusive, self-centered characters, addicted to alcohol and lacking in self-esteem, horrified and polarised New Zealanders.

In 1995, he set up a programme called Books in Homes with the help of Christine Fernyhough. They believed that failures in adult life often stemmed from childhoods spent in bookless homes. The scheme has distributed five million books in New Zealand and a further one million books in the homes of mostly Aboriginal children in Australia. Duff is a trustee of the programme.

Selected published works
Once Were Warriors, 1990, PEN Best First Book for Fiction Award; One Night Out Stealing, 1991; What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?, 1996; Jake’s Long Shadow, 2002; Szabad, 2003; Dreamboat Dad 2008.

Biography
Alan Duff was born in 1950 and is of Ngāti Rangitihi and Tūwharetoa descent. Son of scientist Gowan Duff and Kuia Hinau (of Ngāti Rangitihi and Tūwharetoa), and grandson of notable literary figure, Oliver Duff, he was born and raised in Rotorua.

His start in life was a rough one. After Duff’s parents separated when he was 10, he lived with a Māori uncle and aunt. He was expelled from high school and became a runaway, ending up as a state ward. He then lived for a time with another uncle, anthropologist Roger Duff, and went to Christchurch Boys’ High School. After a period singing in a band, time in a youth detention centre and with numerous convictions for petty offences, Duff went to London where, he has said, he “messed up but grew up”. Back in New Zealand, Duff ran various businesses of his own, before beginning to write full-time in 1985. His first novel, a thriller, was rejected. After burning the manuscript, he began a second, Once Were Warriors, which was published by Tandem Press in 1990. It had an immediate and huge impact, catapulting Duff to national attention. What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? and Jake’s Long Shadow are the second and third novels in the Once Were Warriors trilogy.

Duff’s troubled youth informs his writing, which is set in the world of the underdog. Even his idiosyncratic prose style exhibits the distinctive courage of the self-made man.