News from V.U.P.

Two new releases in October

Patrick Evans's novel The Back of His Head charts the life of New Zealand's only Nobel Prize for Literature winner, the novelist Raymond Lawrence. Lawrence is a literary monster, a terrible person capable of great writing. The story that emerges is a hilarious and troubling satire on the making and manipulation of literary fame, and an exploration of what it takes to make fiction.

Patrick says that he expects readers to feel manipulated by the many twists and turns his new novel takes.

"That’s what novels do; they manipulate, and that’s something I wanted to show as I wrote – the ‘made-upness’ of fiction and how we buy into that aspect by ‘willingly suspending disbelief,’ and how fiction relies on our doing that, how writing/reading is a collaborative project. Above all, The Back of His Head is a reading experience in which the reader is moved around as s/he turns the pages."

The Back of His Head will be launched at Circa Theatre, on the same date of the opening night of the Circa season of Gifted, the play of Patrick's highly acclaimed first novel.

Saturday 10 October, 6.30pm–7.30pm, Circa Theatre.
Patrick will sign copies of the novel, which is for sale at the launch courtesy of Unity Books. p/b, $30.




The New Zealand Literary Fund was a small amount of public money skilfully dispensed over forty years to hundreds of writers and publishers. Unobtrusively but persistently, the fund and the dedicated men and women who allotted its largesse laid the foundations of the literary culture we enjoy today. From a small gesture of government patronage in the postwar world, it slowly grew, expanding its reach, enlarging its ambitions and acquiring partners. This is its story.

The Deepening Stream features strong personalities from poets to politicians, and their dramas and disappointments, hopes and humiliations. It charts the growing confidence of New Zealand writers and the infrastructure supporting them, and gives vivid pictures of individual writers, fledgling publishers and struggling magazines. It recounts how New Zealand readers gradually came to value their own literature.

$40, p/b.