| 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:
Laurence Fearnley’s,(left - photo/Reg Graham), novel The Hut Builder has just won the fiction award at the NZ Post Book Awards. She explains how it grew out of her stubborn reaction to being told her writing was “too New Zealand”.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.
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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