New Zealand Herald - Saturday, 03 May 2014
By Rebecca Barry Hill
New Zealand novelist Shonagh Koea once told a literary editor she was thinking of attending a writing course. "They were en vogue at the time, but he looked at me earnestly and said I must never do that," she says. "He said that I wrote very incorrectly."
He meant this as a compliment; she wouldn't have been named the runner-up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction or held the University of Auckland Fellowship in Literature or the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship if incorrect meant anything other than unconventional. He simply knew that rules would stifle her.
"I'm not sure it's a very good thing for anybody to be bound in by 'have-tos'," Koea says. "I'm very recalcitrant."
This goes some way to explaining her creative process, which is admirably intuitive but also, she says, "naughty". She was forced to ask a computer specialist to help her retrieve parts of her latest novel, which she'd written in fragments and saved, haphazardly, in various folders. "I just thought it was bits."
It wasn't until she went to Paris on holiday last year and was wandering by the Seine, free from domesticity, that she realised she had a story. Those bits became Landscape With Solitary Figure, an atmospheric portrait of a sensitive woman, and the man who takes interest in her greatest fear.
It's an unsettling novel. The lone figure of the title speaks of entertaining the occasional guest at her charming bungalow but we're not immediately sure of the significance.
Eventually we learn about the awful birthday party, and the terrible dinner, attended by snobs and drunks. What happens at these events and why does she feel so unsafe? All is revealed but in languorous good time, and with Koea's signature dark wit.
We're chatting in the author's Bayswater home, which is beautiful and tidy, yet has a wildness about it, bursting with paintings and antiques.
Later, we'll wander through her garden of clivias, which her surgeon son Jonathan recently pointed out were getting a bit out-of-hand.
Read the full interview. I found it most interesting, quite wonderful really.
He meant this as a compliment; she wouldn't have been named the runner-up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction or held the University of Auckland Fellowship in Literature or the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship if incorrect meant anything other than unconventional. He simply knew that rules would stifle her.
"I'm not sure it's a very good thing for anybody to be bound in by 'have-tos'," Koea says. "I'm very recalcitrant."
This goes some way to explaining her creative process, which is admirably intuitive but also, she says, "naughty". She was forced to ask a computer specialist to help her retrieve parts of her latest novel, which she'd written in fragments and saved, haphazardly, in various folders. "I just thought it was bits."
It's an unsettling novel. The lone figure of the title speaks of entertaining the occasional guest at her charming bungalow but we're not immediately sure of the significance.
Eventually we learn about the awful birthday party, and the terrible dinner, attended by snobs and drunks. What happens at these events and why does she feel so unsafe? All is revealed but in languorous good time, and with Koea's signature dark wit.
We're chatting in the author's Bayswater home, which is beautiful and tidy, yet has a wildness about it, bursting with paintings and antiques.
Later, we'll wander through her garden of clivias, which her surgeon son Jonathan recently pointed out were getting a bit out-of-hand.
Read the full interview. I found it most interesting, quite wonderful really.
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