Kiwi Writing

Why are there so many good Kiwi writers? One reason is certainly the excellent education system here, and the inestimable Victoria University Creative Writing degree they offer. But I think it's also their weather, it is so conducive to staying at home in a warm environment and sitting in front of your keyboard, and writing... creating in an atmosphere which is unthreatening but still a bit edgy, earthquake edgy I mean.

The two books I am reading concurrently are written one hundred years apart, and both by pre-eminent Kiwi writers, one living, and one long passed on. The latter, Katherine Mansfield, is reputedly New Zealand's most famous and respected writer, although she wrote most of her work from Europe, and most of it about Europe. But she did remember her youth in Wellington, and her memory is securely locked in a house in Timaru Street where she used to live. I will visit it one day... 

Mansfield wrote somewhat like Jane Austen, describing the morals and habits of the very early twentieth century. Her style and attention to detail was impeccable, and this was to influence quite a bit the work of Witi Ihimaera. Witi was unabashedly intoxicated by her writing, even to the extent of calling an early work of his 'Dear Miss Mansfield'.  However Witi's work, coming from a Maori perspective, naturally looked into vastly different areas than Miss Mansfield's. 

But now, both are famous, and justly so, but for very different reasons.

Witi's Ihimaera's semi autobiography 

A collection of Witi's best short stories in a 'hommage' to Katherine Mansfield