Stephanie Johnson

Profile
Stephanie Johnson is the author of three collections of short stories, two volumes of poetry and seven novels.

She has also written for television, stage, radio and film, and has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships. Johnson is the co-founder and co-Creative Director of the Auckland Readers’ and Writers’ Festival.

Selected published works
The Whistler, 1998; Belief, 2000; The Shag Incident, 2002, Deutz Medal for Fiction, Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2003; Music from a Distant Room, 2004; Drowned Sprat and Other Stories, 2005; John Tomb's Head, 2006; Swimmers' Rope, 2008.

Biography
Stephanie Johnson was born in Auckland in 1961 and after university studies in the early 1980s, she began her writing career as a poet and playwright. Her play Accidental Phantasies won the Bruce Mason Memorial Playwright’s Award in 1985.

Her powerful first collection of poems, The Bleeding Ballerina (1987), was followed by two collections of short stories, The Glass Whittler (1989) and All the Tenderness Left in the World (1993), and two novels, Crimes of Neglect (1992) and The Heart’s Wild Surf (1996).

Johnson’s work is marked by a dry irony, a sharp-edged humour that focuses unerringly on the frailties and foolishness of her characters. Pomposity and self-delusion are favourite targets: take, for example, the creative writing tutor in A One-Page Statement, the eager New Age clients in The Deep Resounding, the arrogant Werner in Menschenfresser and the vicar’s wife in The Heart’s Wild Surf. There is compassion, though, and sensitivity in the development of complex situations. The Heart’s Wild Surf, set in Fiji in 1918, is a subtle, delicately drawn, yet passionately intense portrayal of a family under immense strain.

Johnson was the recipient of the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in 2000 and in 2003 The Shag Incident won the Deutz Medal for Fiction in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, an honour for which her work had previously been shortlisted three times. The Shag Incident was described by the judging panel as a book “clearly by a writer at the peak of her powers … she is fully deserving of the recognition of excellence that this award bestows”.