Elizabeth Knox

Profile
Elizabeth Knox has been called the leading New Zealand novelist of her generation. Her books combine close attention to lived experience with a soaring imagination. Whether they deal with children in suburban New Zealand, winemakers in 19th-century Burgundy, or vampires on the Côte d’Azur, they possess an intensely sensory reality.

Selected published works
After Z-Hour, 1987; Treasure, 1992; Glamour and the Sea, 1996; The Vintner’s Luck, 1998 Deutz Medal for Fiction, Montana New Zealand Book Awards 1999; The High Jump: A New Zealand Childhood, 2000; Black Oxen, 2001; Billie’s Kiss, 2002; Daylight, 2003; Dreamhunter 2005; Dreamquake, 2007; The Vintner's Luck: Tenth Anniversary Edition, 2008; The Love School: Personal Essays, 2008.

Biography
Elizabeth Knox was born in 1959. She studied at Victoria University of Wellington and attended Bill Manhire’s creative writing course. Her first novel, After Z-Hour, was published in 1987, but the book for which she is best known is her fourth, The Vintner’s Luck, which was a huge bestseller in New Zealand. It has also been published in English around the world and translated into German, Dutch, Norwegian, Spanish, French and Hebrew. It won the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, where it also received the Readers’ Choice and Booksellers’ Choice awards; it was longlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize for fiction and won the 2001 Tasmania Pacific Region Prize. A film adaptation of The Vintner’s Luck is being developed by acclaimed writer/director Niki Caro (Whale Rider).

Knox’s fiction is leavened by a prodigious imagination. The situations and characters she creates have the ring of truth whether she writes about the real world or in the realm of pure fantasy.

Her 2001 novel Black Oxen was published simultaneously in the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand and was a New Zealand number one bestseller. Billie’s Kiss made a spectacular entry into the New Zealand bestseller list on the strength of one afternoon’s sales and then shot straight to number one in the following list. Billie’s Kiss was shortlisted in the 2002 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

Daylight had critics in the United States comparing Knox to the Queen of the vampire novelists, with one writer saying Daylight is “on a par with the best Anne Rice has to offer” and calling it an “illuminating tour-de-force”.

Knox has won several awards and fellowships, including the ICI Young Writers’ Bursary, a Scholarship in Letters (1993) and was the Writing Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington in 1997. Knox was the recipient of a 2000 Arts Foundation Laureate Award. In 2002 she was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM).