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Profile
Philip Temple is a distinguished novelist, historian and writer for children.
He has written many narratives of mountaineering and exploration, some distinctive
environmental novels and engaging books for children. His skills as a writer
are brilliantly displayed in A Sort of Conscience, his prize-winning
study of influential colonists, the Wakefield family.
Selected published works
The World at their Feet, 1969, Wattie Book Award 1970; A Sort
of Conscience: The Wakefields, 2002, Montana New Zealand Book Award for
Biography 2003, Ian Wards Prize and the Ernest Scott History Prize from the
University of Melbourne, Australia; Presenting New Zealand, 2001; The Last True Explorer, 2002 (also translated into German and Italian); Presenting New Zealand: An Illustrated History, 2008.
Philip Temple's fiction can be found here.
Biography
Philip Temple was born in Yorkshire in 1939 and educated in London. He
emigrated to New Zealand at the age of eighteen, becoming an explorer, mountaineer
and outdoor educator. He has written two books about New Zealand mountaineers:
The World at Their Feet, which won the Wattie Book Award in 1970, and
Castles in the Air (1973).
Temple became a full-time writer in 1972. Over a period of 40 years he has
published more than 40 books as well as numerous articles. He has held several
fellowships, including the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship (1979), the
Burns Fellowship (1980), the 1996 New Zealand National Library Research Fellowship,
a German DAAD government arts award (1987) and the 2003 Creative New Zealand
Berlin Writers’ Residency. In 2003, Philip was also invested as an Officer
of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for Services to Literature.
A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields was named Biography of the Year
at the 2003 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and was awarded the Archivists and
Records Association of New Zealand Ian Wards Prize and the Ernest Scott History
Prize from the University of Melbourne, Australia. It was shortlisted for the
Tasmania Pacific Bicentenary History Prize. It is an ambitious and engaging
study of the extraordinary Wakefield family who played such a major role in
New Zealand’s colonisation by Britain in the nineteenth century. The New
Zealand Listener chose A Sort of Conscience as one of its Ten
Best Books of the Year for 2002, one of only two New Zealand titles in the list.
In 2005, Temple was recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary
Achievement in Non-fiction. In 2007 he was granted the degree of Doctor of Literature
by the University of Otago for his 'published contributions of special excellence in
linguistic, social, literary and historical knowledge'.
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