“It’s a signal honour,” says McNeish. “I’m pleased not just for myself but because, at a time when books and publishers of books and bookshops are under threat, when writers are becoming an endangered species, an award like this underlines the importance of the written word. I like to think of it as a recognition that literature matters, and perhaps a sign, as one correspondent has written, that ‘producing writing of serious quality out of the New Zealand mainstream has its rewards, it seems, after all!’”
Patricia Grace, Joy Cowley, Witi Ihimaera and Vincent O’Sullivan are all Distinguished Companions, a similar honour, but given under the system that was in place between 2000 and 2008.
The only living writers in New Zealand to achieve a higher honour are Margaret Mahy and CK Stead, who are both members of the Order of New Zealand, of which there can be only 20 living members at any one time. Before they died, Allen Curnow and Janet Frame were also members of the Order of New Zealand.
James McNeish is the author of more than 20 books and plays, and the most recent recipient of the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency. In 2010 he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in the non-fiction category. He’s had a wide and varied career.
“For me the touchstones have always been the people I’ve met and the communities I’ve lived in, rather than the books that resulted,” he says. “I was lucky enough when young to travel and work in places where the culture was different and in some cases the opposite to the one I grew up in. When I returned to New Zealand to live, I found myself looking at it with fresh eyes. This was extraordinarily liberating.”
McNeish has received critical attention both overseas and at home in New Zealand, including being nominated for the 1986 Booker Prize for his novel Lovelock. His non-fiction work has included the best-selling multiple biography Dance of the Peacocks, and The Mask of Sanity: The Bain Murders, his investigation into the Bain murders.
As for his future projects, McNeish says he is working on a project that features some of the people he’s met on his travels. “I’m halfway through a book which attempts to tell a story through memory and the eyes of half a dozen people who’ve mattered in my life – a theatre director in London, a reformer in Sicily, a Kanak leader, a Maori aunt, a maverick poet.”
McNeish says that he and his wife are still a little dazed by the honour, and unsure who it is they have to thank. But he’s already planning how he can use being a knight to help him put back into the writing community. “It may help provide leverage for a project, help cement a travel scheme for New Zealand writers Helen and I hope to initiate in the next twelve months. I’ve received a lot. It’s a way of putting something back.”
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