Maurice Gee

Profile
Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand’s finest fiction writers, a novelist who never fails to produce work of the very highest quality.
Gee has won more book awards than any other New Zealand writer, in both adult and children’s fiction.

Selected published works
In My Father’s Den, 1972; Plumb, 1978, Wattie Book Award 1979; Prowlers, 1987; Going West, 1993, Wattie Book Award 1993; Crime Story, 1994; Live Bodies, 1998, Deutz Medal for Fiction, Montana New Zealand Book Awards 1998; The Scornful Moon, 2003; Blindsight, 2005, Deutz Medal For Fiction or Poetry, the Fiction category and joint winner of the Readers' Choice Award Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2006.

Maurice Gee's children's fiction can be found here.

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

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

Biography
Born in Whakatāne in 1931, Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand’s best-known writers, both for adults and children. He has won many literary awards, including the Wattie Book Award (twice), the Deutz Medal for fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the New Zealand Book Award for fiction (four times). He has also won the Children’s Book of the Year Award. In 2004 Gee received an honorary Doctorate in literature from the University of Auckland and he was among ten of New Zealand’s greatest living artists named as Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon Artists in 2003. In 2004, he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement for Fiction.

According to Gee’s entry in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (1998): “Each of Gee’s novels bountifully gives us a rich vision of some region and aspect of New Zealand life, and of human life in general. Each is peopled with a variety of intensely living and unique personalities together with lush images of the natural and social worlds.”

Gee’s early novels include The Big Season (1962), In My Father’s Den – made into a feature film in a joint New Zealand-British production – Games of Choice (1976) and Plumb. Gee’s brilliantly drawn, intolerant, irascible clergyman, George Plumb, is regarded as one of New Zealand’s most memorable fictional characters. One of Gee’s personal favourites is Prowlers, which features (as many of his novels do) an elderly man looking back on his life.

In the past two decades Gee has produced some of the best novels written in New Zealand, including: The Burning Boy (1990), Going West (winner of the Wattie Book Award), Crime Story (also made into a feature film, Fracture), Live Bodies (winner of the Deutz Medal for fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards), Ellie and the Shadow Man (2002), The Scornful Moon (joint runner-up for the Deutz Medal in 2004) and Blindsight (2005). Gee has also produced a highly acclaimed book of short stories, originally published in 1975 as A Glorious Morning, Comrade and now in print as Collected Stories (1986).

Maurice Gee is also a highly regarded author of books for children. His novel Under the Mountain (1979) and the fantasy series consisting of Motherstone (1985), The Priests of Ferris (1984) and The Halfmen of O (1982) are New Zealand classics. In 2002 Gee was honoured by the Children’s Literature Foundation with the Margaret Mahy Medal and Lecture Award for his long-term contribution to children’s literature and literacy.