Pack of Lies

Chad Taylor was born in New Zealand in November 1964. He grew up in Manurewa, South Auckland and read English and Art History while doing a Fine Arts degree at Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts. ("I wanted to do something creative and I wanted to find out how art worked. Also, all my favourite bands had gone to art school," he says.) While studying he wrote music and film reviews for Rip It Up magazine.

The fate befalling the young woman who wanted "to be a poet" has been well documented. Desperately unhappy because of family tragedies and finding herself trapped in the wrong vocation (as a schoolteacher) her only escape appeared to be in submission to society's judgement of her as abnormal. She spent four and a half years out of eight years, incarcerated in mental hospitals. The story of her almost miraculous survival of the horrors and brutalising treatment in unenlightened institutions has become well known. She continued to write throughout her troubled years, and her first book (The Lagoon and Other Stories) won a prestigious literary prize, thus convincing her doctors not to carry out a planned lobotomy.
 

Maurice Shadbolt was a major New Zealand fiction writer and playwright. He published numerous novels and collections of short fiction, as well as novellas, non-fiction, and a play. His writing often drew on his own family history. Shadbolt won several fellowships and almost every major literary prize, some more than once. He was capped Honorary Doctor of Literature by the University of Auckland in 1997.

James Ronald Hugh Morrieson died at 50, a sad and disappointed man. His remark, ‘I hope I’m not another one of these poor buggers who get discovered when they’re dead’ became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Morrieson was born on 29 January 1922 and lived his entire life in the house built by his grandfather at the corner of Regent Street and South Road, Hawera. A novelist and short story writer in the New Zealand vernacular, who was little known in his home country until after his death. He earned his living as a musician and music teacher, and played in dance bands throughout south Taranaki. Morrieson lived in the Taranaki town of Hawera all his life and this town appears (under other names) in his novels.

New Zealand poet, fiction writer, critic, and art curator.

Keri Hulme (born 9 March 1947) is a New Zealand writer. Her only novel, The Bone People, won the Booker Prize in 1985.

Witi Ihimaera is a novelist and short story writer from New Zealand, perhaps the best-known Māori writer today. He is internationally famous for The Whale Rider.