|
Profile
Short story writer and novelist Owen Marshall has spent almost all his
life in South Island towns and has an affinity with provincial New Zealand.
He has written, or edited, eighteen books. His latest collection of short stories
is Watch of Gryphons and other Stories. His novel, Harlequin Rex,
won the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the 2000 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
Selected published works
The Divided World: Selected Stories, 1989; A Many Coated Man, 1995; Coming Home in the Dark, 1995; The Best of Owen Marshall’s
Short Stories, 1997; Harlequin Rex 1999, Deutz Medal for Fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2000; When Gravity Snaps, 2002; Occasional — 50 Poems, 2004; Watch
of Gryphons and other Stories, 2005; Drybread 2007.
Publishers
Vintage, Random House New Zealand www.randomhouse.co.nz
Biography
Owen Marshall was born in Te Kuiti in 1941 but he has spent most of his
life in the South Island. After completing his Master of Arts degree (with Honours)
at Canterbury University, he became a schoolteacher. It was, however, his long-standing
ambition to write fiction, and in 1971, he funded the publication of his own
first collection of short stories, Supper Waltz Wilson and Other Stories.
New Zealand’s leading practitioner of the form at that time, Frank Sargeson,
recognised in this collection the emergence of his natural successor, writing
that it was “as fine a book of stories as this country is likely to see”.
Marshall continued to work as a schoolteacher until 1991, when he resigned to
become a full-time writer.
Owen Marshall’s fiction defies characterisation. He is adept at depicting
slices of the ordinary life in a way which touches upon universal themes. He
excels at writing from the point of view of a narrator reflecting on past experience,
and his settings are typically drawn from the small-town and rural New Zealand
localities in which the author himself has lived.
In 1992 he was awarded the Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago and
in 1996 he was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship, which enabled
him to reside in Menton in France.
Marshall has won many awards, including the Deutz Medal for Fiction in the
2000 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. His work has been regularly published
in New Zealand magazines and periodicals, and also in Australia, Britain, Germany,
United States, China and Japan.
In 2000 he was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for
Services to Literature and, in 2002, the University of Canterbury awarded him
an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree. He was the inaugural recipient of the
Creative New Zealand Writers’ Fellowship in 2003, which resulted in the
publication of Watch of Gryphons and Other Stories in 2005.In 2007,
the New Zealand Society of Authors and Nelson winery Woollaston Estate announced
the establishment of a Writer in Residence programme. Marshall will be based at
the winery in June, running writing workshops, tutoring and performing.
|
