"It’s a great honour to be here and receive this award. After a period away overseas it’s a very warm homecoming. A writer, as we all know, doesn’t stand alone isolated from the society he lives in. A great many people have helped and supported me in recent years, to whom I am in debt, among them especially my publisher Harriet Allan of Random House in Auckland who is here tonight. I would like to thank Harriet for her enthusiasm and friendship, also my agent Michael Gifkins who has helped introduce my books to a wider audience, and also the invisible and reticent law professor and poet in Auckland, Bernard Brown, from whose wise and witty counsel I have been benefiting ever since I returned to New Zealand to live.
The award is for non-fiction, although, as has been said, I am also a novelist. Indeed it might be argued that since I’ve been writing novels for almost fifty years, the non-fiction category is a misnomer. I say this of course mischievously, bearing in mind those critics who claim that much of my non-fiction is invented anyway. Here I am rescued by the late Oscar Wilde. You remember what Oscar Wilde said in his play, The Importance of Being Earnest. He’s quoting the governess, the one who left the baby in a handbag at Victoria station. At the end of the play when everything has fallen nicely into place she says, and I quote: “The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”
However, in my books the good characters all seem to come to a sticky end, so I must be a writer of non-fiction after all.
Standing here I feel a bit like Michael Holroyd. I’ve sometimes been described, at literary functions and festivals, as “an award-winning writer”, then like Holroyd I would hurry home afterwards to find which award I had won. Only to find the cupboard bare. It took me some time to realise that this was one of those phrases employed by well-meaning journalists and others who had obviously not read my books and were at a loss what to say. As we all know, if you say something often enough about someone it is taken to be true. Though in my case “award-winning” is patently untrue. Without benefit of fiction, I can declare honestly how glad I am to receive this award: my first-ever literary prize.
I am grateful for the recognition for another reason. I regard the award as both an honour and a responsibility. Since learning about it informally I have been giving some thought to putting the money - some of it - towards establishing a scholarship for young writers. This is something my wife and I have talked about and made provision for elsewhere, but now this award provides an incentive and perhaps a way to kick-start the scheme in our lifetime. It’s a scheme based on a philosophy that’s come from my own travels, one that recognises the need of writers from a remote country like New Zealand to get away from this society and travel in order to get to know it better when they come back. What happened in my case was that I had to leave New Zealand in order to be introduced to it. I left for Europe as a young man and was fortunate enough to spend some years living in a peasant society in the Mediterranean where the prevailing mores and culture were the opposite of everything I’d been brought up to believe in. Attitudes I’d taken for granted as absolutes in New Zealand, I found myself questioning.
One result was that when I came home I found myself looking at this country with fresh eyes. I remember being staggered by the qualities of excellence I found in young New Zealanders, which I’d previously ignored or overlooked, a discovery that was reflected later in Dance of the Peacocks and The Sixth Man.
Looking back, I can see that the experience of living and working in an alien culture, changed my way of thinking and, for better or worse, has affected almost everything I have written since. And out of this has come the idea of a travel scholarship which is a kind of “hardship scholarship” for young New Zealand writers - and journalists. And one I’m happy to say, that an established foundation has already expressed an interest in sponsoring.
Finally I would like to pay tribute to my wife Helen who has put up with me for more than forty years, been a companion on my travels and a creative influence on my writing.
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