Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Laurence Fearnley interview

By Siobhan Harvey| Published on July 16, 2011 | NZ Listener , Issue 3714

Further to Nicky Pellegrino's review of The Hut Builder on the blog yesterday I am posting this interview with the author from The Listener last month:

Dunedin author Laurence Fearnley should be on a high. [At the time of this interview she had] been shortlisted for the New Zealand Post Book Award for Fiction. The novel in question, The Hut Builder, tells the story of a budding mountain climber, Boden Black, his 1950s adolescence in the Mackenzie Basin and his association with influential New Zealanders such as Ed Hillary and Charles Brasch. The book is already a best-seller. The cachet of the shortlisting – Fearnley’s third where the country’s top literary prize is concerned – will surely boost The Hut Builder’s sales and its author’s literary standing.
Talk to Fearnley, though, and the fraught relationship between this novel and her status as a writer is quickly revealed.

“Writing The Hut Builder was partly a reactionary thing,” she admits. “When my sixth novel, Edwin and Matilda, was shortlisted for awards, I convinced myself it must be a good book. Yet I couldn’t get it published overseas. In fact, none of my books have been published overseas. When I asked why, I was told what I write is ‘too New Zealand’ for international audiences.”
She sighs. “I reacted strongly to that. I know I should have listened to the feedback then written a book set overseas, which might have reached audiences in Europe and America. But I thought, ‘Stuff you, I’m going to write a book which is so New Zealand that anyone who isn’t a New Zealander won’t understand half of it.’”
Anger seems an unlikely literary motivation for an author who’s 1.62m tall, thinly built and softly spoken.
Siobahn Harvey's full interview here.

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