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Profile
Lloyd Jones is one of New Zealand’s foremost contemporary novelists,
a singular stylist whose work defies easy categorisation. Described in The
Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (1998) as “a suburban
realist who simultaneously challenges realism”, Jones has won numerous
awards and fellowships for the originality and relevance of his work.
Selected published works
Biografi, 1993; The Book of Fame, 2000, Deutz Medal
for Fiction, Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2001; Here at the End of the
World We Learn to Dance, 2002; Paint Your Wife, 2004; Mister Pip, 2006, winner of the Montana Medal for fiction and the Reader's Choice award at Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007, shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize.
Biography
Lloyd Jones was born in Wellington’s Lower Hutt in 1955. He was
educated at Victoria University of Wellington and has worked as a journalist
and consultant, but throughout his career has been a dedicated writer of fiction.
Jones was the 1988 Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow in Menton.
His novels are: Gilmore’s Dairy and Splinter, both
early works based in and on his home town; Choo Woo (1998), a disturbing
and controversial tale of a girl’s sexual abuse by her stepfather, and
the award-winning and much acclaimed The Book of Fame, a fictionalised
recreation of the 1905 All Black rugby union team’s tour of Europe, and
winner of the Deutz Medal for Fiction in the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
The Book of Fame also won the $40,000 Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize
in 2003 and was successfully adapted for the stage. Here at the End of the
World We Learn to Dance was joint runner-up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction
in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2003. His most recent work is the well-received
Paint Your Wife.
Jones’s short fiction collection, Swimming to Australia (1991),
was shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction, and his stories
have been anthologised in New Zealand’s Vital Writing, The
Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories and elsewhere. Jones’s distinctive
interest in popular culture and sport found expression in a collection of sports
writing by other prominent New Zealand writers and in the curation of an exhibition,
for which he wrote the accompanying essay, depicting the phenomenon of the New
Zealand Saturday, later published as Last Saturday (1994). A children’s
picture book, Napoleon and the Chicken Farmer, with illustrations by
Graeme Gash, was published in 2003.
Jones was also the instigator of a series of essays by prominent New Zealanders,
sponsored by Montana New Zealand and published under his own imprint, Four Winds
Press. He is a highly respected journalist and travel writer whose work is published
in magazines and newspapers in many parts of the world. Mister Pip won the South East
Asia and South Pacific Region of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book Award 2007.
Jones is the 2007 recipient of the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency.
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