New Zealand’s literary tradition is small but extraordinary — shaped by geographic isolation, the meeting of Māori and European cultures, and a landscape that ranges from subtropical forests to glaciers. Here are 20 authors who have made New Zealand’s voice heard around the world.
New Zealand literature, for a country of just over five million people, has an outsized presence on the global stage. Two New Zealand writers have won the Booker Prize (Keri Hulme in 1985 and Eleanor Catton in 2013). Katherine Mansfield is recognized as one of the inventors of the modern short story. Janet Frame is one of the most original novelists of the 20th century. And a strong tradition of Māori and Pacific writing has given the country a literary voice unlike any other in the English-speaking world.
The history of written literature in New Zealand is relatively short. European settlement began in earnest in the mid-19th century, and the earliest New Zealand novels — like Lady Mary Anne Barker’s Station Life in New Zealand (1870) — were largely accounts of colonial experience written for a British audience. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that a distinctly New Zealand literary sensibility began to emerge, led by Katherine Mansfield, who left New Zealand for London as a young woman but drew on her Wellington childhood throughout her short, brilliant career.
The mid-20th century saw the emergence of a generation of writers who grappled with what it meant to be a New Zealand writer, rather than a British colonial one. Frank Sargeson developed a spare, laconic prose style rooted in New Zealand speech patterns. Janet Frame, whom Sargeson mentored, pushed New Zealand fiction into genuinely new psychological and formal territory. And the rise of Māori literature in English — beginning with Witi Ihimaera’s Tangi (1973), the first novel published by a Māori writer — opened up questions of identity, colonialism, and belonging that remain central to New Zealand literature today.
What makes New Zealand literature distinctive is a combination of factors: the country’s geographic isolation at the bottom of the Pacific, its bicultural heritage (Māori and Pākehā), the weight of landscape in the national imagination — those mountains, that coastline, the bush — and a persistent sense of being on the edge of the world, looking both inward and outward. The writers on this list have responded to those conditions in wildly different ways, from Mansfield’s exquisite miniatures to Catton’s sprawling epic, from the fiercely political fiction of Patricia Grace to the noir-inflected thrillers of Carl Nixon.
For more on literary traditions from the region, check out our list of the best Australian authors. Fans of classic literature will also enjoy our roundup of the best classic literature books, and readers interested in British literary connections should see our list of the best British authors.
Table of Contents
Open Table of Contents
Where to Start vs. Deeper Cuts
If you’re new to New Zealand literature, the comparison table above gives you five excellent entry points. Katherine Mansfield’s short stories are the cornerstone of the tradition. Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries are the two Booker Prize winners. Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider is the most widely read introduction to Māori literary perspectives, and Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry is a startling first novel that announces a wholly original voice.
For deeper cuts, seek out Maurice Gee’s Plumb trilogy, Patricia Grace’s Potiki, C.K. Stead’s All Visitors Ashore, and Catherine Chidgey’s The Wish Child. These are writers who have built substantial bodies of work that reward extended reading.
Classic and Pioneer Authors
1. Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)
Katherine Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington in 1888. She left New Zealand for London in 1908, at the age of 19, and never returned, though her childhood in Wellington and the surrounding area provided the material for her greatest stories. She died of tuberculosis in Fontainebleau, France, in 1923, at the age of 34.
In her short life, Mansfield transformed the English-language short story. She was influenced by Anton Chekhov and moved the form away from the plot-driven, twist-ending stories of writers like O. Henry and toward something more subtle, impressionistic, and psychologically penetrating. Her stories — “The Garden Party,” “Bliss,” “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” “Prelude,” “At the Bay” — capture moments of consciousness with extraordinary precision: the way a child experiences a party, the way a woman recognizes her own self-deception, the way grief and joy can exist simultaneously.
Mansfield was part of the London literary scene alongside Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley. Woolf admired and envied her in roughly equal measure, writing in her diary after Mansfield’s death: “I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.”
Despite leaving New Zealand at 19, Mansfield returned again and again in her imagination to the Wellington of her childhood. Stories like “Prelude” and “At the Bay” recreate the Beauchamp family’s life in colonial New Zealand with a vividness that makes you taste the sea air and feel the summer heat on the veranda. Her influence on the modern short story is hard to overstate — writers from Elizabeth Bowen to Alice Munro have acknowledged their debt to her.
The Garden Party and Other Stories is the essential collection. Every story in it is worth studying.
“Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself.”
2. Janet Frame (1924-2004)
Janet Frame was born in Dunedin in 1924, the third of five children in a poor family. Her childhood was marked by tragedy — two of her sisters drowned in separate accidents — and her adult life was shaped by a catastrophic misdiagnosis: she was committed to psychiatric hospitals and received over 200 electroconvulsive therapy treatments over eight years. She was scheduled for a lobotomy when the news arrived that her first book, a short story collection called The Lagoon and Other Stories (1951), had won a national literary prize. The lobotomy was cancelled.
Frame’s fiction is unlike anyone else’s. Her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957), tells the story of a poor New Zealand family through a kaleidoscope of voices, memories, and poetic imagery. Faces in the Water (1961) draws on her hospital experiences. Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963) and The Adaptable Man (1965) pushed further into experimental territory. Her three-volume autobiography — To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984), and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985) — is a masterpiece of the form and was adapted into a celebrated film by Jane Campion in 1990.
Frame was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times and was awarded the Order of New Zealand, the country’s highest honor, in 1990. She died in 2004. Her legacy has only grown since then — she is now widely considered one of the most important writers New Zealand has produced, and her influence can be felt in the work of writers as varied as Eleanor Catton and Catherine Chidgey.
Frame published eleven novels, four collections of short stories, a book of poetry, and a children’s book. Among her later novels, Living in the Maniototo (1979) and The Carpathians (1988) — the latter winning the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize — demonstrate the range and ambition of her vision.
Owls Do Cry is the best starting point for her fiction. For the autobiography, begin with To the Is-Land.
“I was now an adult. I could sleep as late as I wanted, but there was nothing worth staying awake for.”
3. Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982)
Dame Ngaio Marsh was born in Christchurch in 1895 and is one of the “Queens of Crime” alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham. She published 32 detective novels between 1934 and 1982, all featuring her aristocratic detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard.
Marsh’s detective fiction is set mainly in England, though several novels draw on New Zealand settings, including Colour Scheme (1943) and Died in the Wool (1945). Her theatre background — she was a prominent theatre director in New Zealand, particularly at the Canterbury University Drama Society — gives her novels a strong sense of performance and staging. Several of her mysteries are set in theatrical environments, including Enter a Murderer (1935), Opening Night (1951), and Light Thickens (1982), her final novel, set during a production of Macbeth.
Marsh was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1966 for her contributions to theatre and literature. She remains one of New Zealand’s most internationally recognized writers.
A Man Lay Dead, her first novel, is a good starting point, though Artists in Crime (1938) is where Alleyn becomes a more fully realized character.
“I don’t think you can write well about anything that isn’t close to you.”
4. Frank Sargeson (1903-1982)
Frank Sargeson was born Norris Frank Davey in Hamilton in 1903 and is widely regarded as the father of the New Zealand short story. He developed a spare, vernacular prose style — influenced by Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson but rooted in the speech patterns of working-class New Zealand men — that became enormously influential on subsequent generations of Kiwi writers.
Sargeson’s stories, collected in volumes like A Man and His Wife (1940) and That Summer and Other Stories (1946), typically feature laconic, working-class male narrators who reveal more than they intend through the gaps and silences in their speech. The stories are deceptively simple on the surface but carry undercurrents of loneliness, repressed sexuality (Sargeson was gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal in New Zealand), and quiet desperation.
Beyond his own writing, Sargeson was a crucial mentor and supporter of other writers. He housed Janet Frame in a converted army hut on his property in Takapuna and encouraged her to write. His influence on New Zealand literary culture extends far beyond his published work.
The Stories of Frank Sargeson is the definitive collection.
“I was sitting on the verandah watching the sun go down when this joker comes along.”
5. C.K. Stead (b. 1932)
Christian Karlson Stead was born in Auckland in 1932 and had a long career as a professor of English at the University of Auckland before retiring to write full-time. He is a novelist, poet, short story writer, critic, and memoirist — one of the most complete literary figures New Zealand has produced.
Stead’s critical study The New Poetic (1964) was influential in reshaping how modernist poetry was understood in the English-speaking world. His novels range from the autobiographical campus fiction of All Visitors Ashore (1984) — set in Auckland during the 1951 waterfront strike — to the formally playful The Death of the Body (1986) and the historical fiction of Mansfield (2004), a novel about Katherine Mansfield.
Stead has been a provocative and sometimes controversial figure in New Zealand literary culture, willing to challenge orthodoxies from both the left and the right. He was appointed a Member of the Order of New Zealand in 2007.
All Visitors Ashore is the best introduction to his fiction.
“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”
Mid-Century Voices
6. Maurice Gee (b. 1931)
Maurice Gee was born in Whakatane in 1931 and grew up in Henderson, then a small town on the western outskirts of Auckland. He’s one of New Zealand’s most decorated writers, having won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction six times — a record.
Gee is best known for his Plumb trilogy — Plumb (1978), Meg (1981), and Sole Survivor (1983) — which follows three generations of a New Zealand family through the 20th century. The first novel, narrated by retired Presbyterian minister George Plumb, is generally considered Gee’s masterpiece: a novel about faith, politics, family, and the way idealism can curdle into rigidity. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the UK.
Gee has also written successful children’s fiction, including the Under the Mountain series and the O Trilogy. His adult novels include Going West (1992), Crime Story (1994), and Blindsight (2005). He writes with moral seriousness, psychological depth, and a clear, unshowy prose style.
Plumb is the place to begin — one of the great New Zealand novels.
“A man can hold a truth and fail to live by it. That’s the human condition.”
7. Fiona Kidman (b. 1940)
Dame Fiona Kidman was born in Hawera in 1940 and has been a central figure in New Zealand literature for over fifty years. She is a novelist, short story writer, poet, and memoirist, and was appointed Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 1998.
Kidman’s novel The Book of Secrets (1987) is a multigenerational saga that follows a group of Scottish settlers who arrive in New Zealand in the 1880s and traces their descendants through a century of change. It won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. Her later novels include The Captive Wife (2005), based on the true story of Betty Guard, a settler kidnapped by Māori in 1834, and This Mortal Boy (2018), based on the case of Albert Black, the last person hanged in New Zealand, in 1955. This Mortal Boy won the Ockham New Zealand Book Award.
Kidman writes historical fiction with meticulous research and deep empathy for her characters, many of whom are women caught in circumstances they can’t control.
This Mortal Boy is her most acclaimed recent work and a powerful entry point.
“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry its consequences with us.”
8. Joy Cowley (b. 1936)
Joy Cowley was born in Levin in 1936 and is one of New Zealand’s most beloved writers, though she’s known for very different things depending on your age. For children, she’s the author of hundreds of early readers used in schools throughout New Zealand, Australia, and the United States — including the famous Mrs. Wishy-Washy series. For adults, she’s a novelist and short story writer of considerable power.
Cowley’s adult novels include Nest in a Falling Tree (1967), a love story between a young woman and an older man that caused controversy in 1960s New Zealand, and The Silent One (1981), about a deaf boy in a Pacific island community. Her short stories, collected in volumes like Heart Attack and Other Stories (1985), are sharp, compassionate, and often quietly devastating.
Cowley was appointed a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2005. She lives in the Marlborough Sounds.
Nest in a Falling Tree is her most significant adult novel.
“Writing is about finding the truth and putting it on the page.”
9. Owen Marshall (b. 1941)
Owen Marshall was born Owen Marshall Jones in Te Kuiti in 1941 and spent most of his career as a schoolteacher in Canterbury while building one of the most significant bodies of short fiction in New Zealand literature. He has published over a dozen short story collections and several novels, and he’s often described as the natural successor to Frank Sargeson in the New Zealand short story tradition.
Marshall’s stories are set in small-town and rural New Zealand, and they capture the texture of ordinary Kiwi life with quiet precision — the social hierarchies of country towns, the distances between people who live side by side, the moments of cruelty and kindness that define small communities. His prose is measured and controlled, with a Chekhovian attention to the details that reveal character.
He was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2000 and has won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction multiple times.
Coming Home in the Dark: Selected Stories is an excellent introduction to his work. (The title story was adapted into a critically acclaimed New Zealand film in 2021.)
“There are things that happen in the country that people in the city will never know about.”
10. Hone Tuwhare (1922-2008)
Hone Tuwhare was born in Kaikohe in the Far North in 1922 and was of Ngā Puhi descent. He is New Zealand’s most celebrated Māori poet and one of the country’s most beloved writers in any genre. His first collection, No Ordinary Sun (1964), was the first book of poetry published by a Māori writer and became one of the bestselling books of New Zealand poetry ever published.
Tuwhare worked as a boilermaker for much of his life and was a committed trade unionist and political activist. His poetry draws on the rhythms of Māori oratory, the cadences of working-class speech, and the natural world — particularly the landscapes of the Far North and the Catlins, where he lived in later life. His most famous poem, “Rain,” is a tender address to the rain itself and has been memorized by generations of New Zealand schoolchildren.
Tuwhare published over a dozen collections of poetry and was named New Zealand’s second Te Mata Poet Laureate in 1999. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Auckland.
No Ordinary Sun is the essential collection.
“I can hear you / making small holes / in the silence / rain.”
Contemporary Authors
11. Eleanor Catton (b. 1985)
Eleanor Catton was born in London, Ontario, Canada, in 1985 to New Zealand parents and grew up in Christchurch. She studied English at the University of Canterbury and creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. Her second novel, The Luminaries (2013), won the Man Booker Prize, making Catton — at 28 — the youngest author ever to win the award. (She also holds the distinction of having written the longest novel to win the Booker.)
The Luminaries is a colossal achievement: an 832-page novel set during the 1866 gold rush on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island. The structure is based on astrological charts, with twelve characters corresponding to the zodiac signs and seven characters corresponding to the celestial bodies, and the chapters shrink in length according to the phases of the moon. It sounds like a gimmick, but Catton pulls it off with total control, and the novel works as both a gripping mystery and a formal experiment.
Her debut novel, The Rehearsal (2008), about the aftermath of a sex scandal at a girls’ school, won the 2009 Betty Trask Award. Her third novel, Birnam Wood (2023), is a contemporary eco-thriller about a guerrilla gardening collective that becomes entangled with an American billionaire prepper in rural New Zealand. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Birnam Wood is leaner and more propulsive than The Luminaries, and its themes of environmental destruction, inequality, and political idealism feel urgently of the moment.
The Luminaries is a staggering piece of work, though Birnam Wood is a more accessible starting point if you prefer contemporary settings.
“A fortune is not made; it is made up.”
12. Lloyd Jones (b. 1955)
Lloyd Jones was born in Lower Hutt in 1955. His novel Mister Pip (2007) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It tells the story of Matilda, a young girl on the war-torn island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, whose life is transformed when a white man, Mr. Watts — the only white person left on the island — begins reading Dickens’s Great Expectations to the village children.
The novel is about the power of stories to sustain people in desperate circumstances, but it never becomes sentimental. The contrast between the world of Dickens and the brutality of the civil war on Bougainville is harrowing, and Jones handles the collision of cultures — Melanesian, colonial, literary — with subtlety and care.
Jones’s other novels include The Book of Fame (2000), a fictionalized account of the 1905 All Blacks rugby tour of Britain, Hand Me Down World (2010), and The Cage (2018).
Mister Pip is his finest novel and an excellent introduction.
“A character could migrate out of a book into your life.”
If you’re working on your own writing — whether fiction, essays, or blog posts — a tool like Grammarly is useful for polishing your prose and catching errors that slip through during drafting.
13. Carl Nixon (b. 1967)
Carl Nixon was born in Christchurch in 1967 and is a novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His short fiction has won numerous awards in New Zealand, and his novels have earned critical acclaim for their taut plotting and psychological depth.
Nixon’s novel The Tally Stick (2020) is set in a remote bach (holiday cottage) on the West Coast of the South Island, where a couple’s marriage is tested to breaking point during isolation. It’s a domestic thriller that uses the wild, isolated New Zealand landscape to claustrophobic effect. His earlier novels include Rocking Horse Road (2007), about a group of boys in a Christchurch suburb in the 1980s whose summer is shattered by the disappearance of a local girl, and Settlers’ Creek (2010).
Nixon’s writing is precise and atmospheric, and he has a gift for evoking the particular textures of New Zealand suburban and rural life.
The Tally Stick is his most accomplished novel.
“The landscape had a way of holding its secrets close.”
14. Catherine Chidgey (b. 1970)
Catherine Chidgey was born in Auckland in 1970 and grew up in Upper Hutt. She studied German at Victoria University of Wellington and lived in Berlin before returning to New Zealand. Her debut novel, In a Fishbone Church (1998), won the Betty Trask Award in the UK and was longlisted for the Orange Prize.
Chidgey’s most celebrated novel is The Wish Child (2016), set in Nazi Germany and told through the perspective of a ghostly observer — the “wish child” of the title — who watches as two families, one sympathetic to the regime and one opposed, navigate the horrors of the 1930s and ’40s. It won the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her subsequent novel, Remote Sympathy (2020), is also set during World War II, this time inside Buchenwald concentration camp, told partly through the perspective of the camp commandant’s wife.
Chidgey’s historical fiction is meticulous, atmospheric, and haunting. She’s one of New Zealand’s most significant living novelists.
The Wish Child is her finest work so far.
“Memory is a strange thing. It preserves what it chooses.”
15. Elizabeth Knox (b. 1959)
Elizabeth Knox was born in Wellington in 1959 and studied English at Victoria University of Wellington. She’s one of New Zealand’s most versatile writers, moving between literary fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, and young adult fiction with equal assurance.
Her novel The Vintner’s Luck (1998) — about a 19th-century Burgundian winemaker who has an annual encounter with an angel — won the Deutz Medal for Fiction and was adapted into a 2009 film. Wake (2013), set in a small New Zealand town where everyone suddenly falls asleep, is a formally ambitious exploration of consciousness and community. Her Dreamhunter duology — Dreamhunter (2005) and Dreamquake (2007) — is a fantasy set in an alternate early 20th-century New Zealand where certain people can enter a mysterious landscape and harvest dreams.
Knox’s imagination is genuinely original, and her prose is elegant and controlled. She has won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction and the Esther Glen Award for children’s fiction. More recently, The Absolute Book (2019) is a massive, genre-blending novel involving libraries, fairies, and the afterlife that has drawn comparisons to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It was published internationally to enthusiastic reviews.
The Vintner’s Luck is the natural starting point.
“Love is not what you expect.”
16. Emily Perkins (b. 1970)
Emily Perkins was born in Christchurch in 1970 and is a novelist and short story writer. Her debut collection, Not Her Real Name and Other Stories (1996), won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her novels include Novel About My Wife (2008), about a man whose obsessive love for his wife becomes its own form of control, and The Forrests (2012), which follows a woman named Dorothy Forrest from childhood to old age in fragmented, impressionistic chapters.
Perkins teaches creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington. Her writing is psychologically acute, formally inventive, and attuned to the small moments of disconnection and longing in everyday life.
The Forrests is her most ambitious work.
“The story is always in the gaps.”
Māori and Pacific Voices
The emergence of Māori writing in English has been one of the most significant developments in New Zealand literature since the 1970s. These writers explore identity, colonialism, belonging, and the intersection of Māori and Pākehā (European New Zealander) cultures.
17. Witi Ihimaera (b. 1944)
Witi Ihimaera was born in Gisborne in 1944 and is of Te Aitanga-a-Mahaki descent. He holds a unique place in New Zealand literary history: his short story collection Pounamu, Pounamu (1972) was the first book of fiction published by a Māori writer, and his novel Tangi (1973) was the first novel published by a Māori writer.
Ihimaera’s most internationally famous work is The Whale Rider (1987), a novella about a young girl named Kahu who believes she is destined to be the leader of her tribe, despite the objections of her traditionalist grandfather. The 2002 film adaptation, starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, was a global hit and earned Castle-Hughes an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress at the age of 13. The story draws on the Māori legend of Paikea, the whale rider, and it’s a powerful tale about heritage, gender, and the renewal of cultural identity.
Ihimaera’s other major works include The Matriarch (1986), an epic novel spanning Māori history, and Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1995), one of the first New Zealand novels to center a gay Māori protagonist. He is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Auckland.
The Whale Rider is the most accessible entry point.
“A long time ago, the sea was our garden. We were the people of the sea.”
18. Patricia Grace (b. 1937)
Patricia Grace was born in Wellington in 1937 and is of Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa, and Te Āti Awa descent. She was the first Māori woman to publish a collection of short stories — Waiariki (1975) — and has been a central figure in Māori literature for five decades.
Her novel Potiki (1986) is set in a coastal Māori community threatened by developers who want to build a tourist resort on their land. The novel draws on traditional Māori narrative forms — including the whakapapa (genealogy) and the kōrero (storytelling) traditions — and weaves them into a modern narrative about resistance, community, and the relationship between land and identity. It won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.
Grace’s other novels include Cousins (1992), about three Māori women whose lives diverge because of the effects of colonization, and Tu (2004), about a Māori soldier serving in the 28th Māori Battalion in Italy during World War II.
Potiki is essential reading for understanding contemporary Māori fiction.
“We don’t own the land. The land owns us.”
19. Keri Hulme (1947-2021)
Keri Hulme was born in Christchurch in 1947 and was of Kāi Tahu Māori, Orkney Scots, and Lancashire English ancestry. She lived for most of her adult life in Okarito, a tiny settlement on the West Coast of the South Island, among the wetlands and coastal bush.
The Bone People (1984) won the 1985 Booker Prize and is one of the most significant — and debated — New Zealand novels ever published. It tells the story of three damaged people: Kerewin Holmes, a reclusive, part-Māori artist; Joe Gillayley, a Māori factory worker; and Simon, a mute European child who washed ashore from a shipwreck and was taken in by Joe. The novel braids together Māori mythology, violence, spirituality, and healing in a way that is by turns lyrical and harrowing.
The book was rejected by several publishers before being published by a small feminist press, Spiral Collective. Its Booker Prize win was controversial — some critics found the prose overwritten and the violence unpalatable — but its supporters argued that it represented a genuinely new form of fiction, one that didn’t fit neatly into European literary categories.
The Bone People is a novel you have to meet on its own terms. It demands patience and rewards it.
“They were nothing more than people, by themselves. Even paired, any pairing, they would have been nothing more than people by themselves. But all together, they have become the heart and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, something strange and growing and great.”
Hulme published very little after The Bone People — a collection of short stories, Te Kaihau/The Windeater (1986), and a poetry collection. She lived a deliberately solitary life in Okarito, fishing, writing, and collecting stones. She died in 2021. Despite her small output, her impact on New Zealand literature — and on the question of what a New Zealand novel can be — is immense.
20. Becky Manawatu (b. 1985)
Becky Manawatu is of Ngāi Tahu and Ngāti Waewae descent and lives on the West Coast of the South Island. Her debut novel, Auē (2019), won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards — the top fiction prize in the country.
Auē tells the story of two brothers, Taukiri and Ārama, who are separated after the death of their mother. Taukiri, the older brother, is a talented guitarist struggling with grief and addiction. Ārama, the younger, is placed in an unsafe home and desperately needs his brother’s protection. The novel moves between their perspectives and across time, weaving in music, Māori mythology, and the natural world.
The title means “to cry out” or “to howl” in te reo Māori, and the novel lives up to its name — it is a visceral, emotional, and ultimately hopeful story about the bonds between brothers, the intergenerational effects of trauma, and the enduring power of whanau (family).
Auē announces a major new voice in New Zealand literature.
“Music is just noise until someone listens.”
New Zealand literature, for all its relative youth and the small size of the country that produces it, is remarkably vibrant and varied. From Mansfield’s luminous short stories to Catton’s structurally audacious novels, from the Māori literary renaissance to the crime fiction of Ngaio Marsh, these 20 writers represent a tradition that continues to surprise, challenge, and move readers around the world. If you’re looking to explore more literary traditions, see our lists of the best Australian authors, the best British authors, and the best American authors.