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1955
Publishes first short
story, The Widow,
in Landfall
___________
1961
Spends the year teaching
and writing in England
___________
1962
Publishes first novel,
The Big Season
___________
1964
Burns Fellow
___________
1979
Publishes first children's
book, Under the Mountain
___________
1981-83
Plumb, Meg and
Sole Survivor
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1998
Live Bodies wins Deutz
Medal for Fiction at the
Montana New Zealand
Book Awards
___________
2002
Honoured by the
Children's Literature
Foundation for contribution
to children's fiction
___________
2004
Received a $60,000 Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement for fiction and received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Auckland
___________
2006
Won the Deutz Medal for ficton, in the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards for his novel Blindsight published by Penguin Books in 2005 .
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Maurice GeeWriter
Maurice Gee was born in Whakatane in 1931 and passed
much of his childhood in the country town of Henderson-a town that
finds many fictional equivalents in his writing. Particularly significant
for Maurice was Henderson Creek where, he said, "I seem to have spent
half my boyhood", and which represents "a place of marvelous and terrible
things".
Maurice gained an MA in English Literature in 1954 and initially worked
as a schoolteacher in Paeroa, but found little to enjoy in the profession.
He spent 1961 teaching and writing in England, partly supported by
a grant from the New Zealand Literary Fund, a testimony to his
growing literary status.
A year later The Big Season, Gee's first novel, was published.
Patterns and themes that would shape later books are already there:
tension between family members, violence as an unavoidable fact of
life, social constraint and inner freedom. Gee's literary breakthrough
came with the publication of the trilogy - Plumb (1978),
Meg (1981) and Sole Survivor (1983) which provide a broadly conceived image
of life in New Zealand over three generations. Plumb is widely considered
one of New Zealand's finest novels.
Maurice soon added another string to his bow by venturing into writing
for children. As a result of this, many of the children growing up
with Maurice's hugely captivating children's books such as Under the Mountain have also
turned into enthusiastic readers of his adult work.
Books published from the mid-1980s proved that here was a novelist
working at the height of his imaginative powers. With Prowlers (1987)
and The Burning Boy (1990), Gee confirmed the skills he developed to
a high art: the historical novel grounded firmly in the present, and
the complex novel of social life. Going West (1993) is similarly significant
for its exploration of the nature of literary creation, while Live
Bodies (1998) crowns Maurice's success by winning the Deutz Medal for
Fiction at the 1998 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. In 2002 Maurice was honoured by the Children's Literature Foundation for his contribution to children's fiction.
Since receiving his Icon Award in 2003 Maurice Gee has gone on to publish The Scornful Moon (Penguin Books, 2003), which was shortlisted for Best Book in the South Pacific & South East Asian Region of the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Maurice Gee was the winner of 2004 the Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Much-loved Book with his fantasy classic Under the Mountain. The film Fracture, based on the novel Crime Story by Maurice Gee, was released throughout New Zealand in June 2004.
In My Father's Den was made into a feature film and also released in New Zealand in 2004; The Scornful Moon was a runner up in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004 and in 2004 Maurice Gee received a $60,000 Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement for fiction and in the same year received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Auckland.
Blindsight (2005), won the Deutz Medal for ficton, in the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and
Salt (Penguin New Zealand, 2007), has been nominated in the Young Adult fiction section of the 2008 New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. |
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