Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.
A cowboy’s odyssey into a vanished world was a poignant companion in Scotland’s Hebrides, where the bleak and beautiful coexist, and family ties are woven from ancient, comforting cloth
Cowboys Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Michael Tait
I was raised in an itinerant military family: four of us, 10 months here, a year there. Dad on tour, mum, my sister and I in another impersonal quarter. If Mum wasn’t packing the MFO folding wooden crates, she was unpacking them. When people ask me where I’m from, I say Scotland or Edinburgh, that answer hollow, inauthentic, actually I’m not from anywhere, I’m an “army brat”. My father was uprooted too, adopted as a baby by a good man, a labourer for Scottish and Newcastle breweries in Edinburgh and his wife, housekeeper to a garrulous old tea planter. His birth certificate had been signed by his mother in a hospital for unmarried mothers. She was from a tiny hamlet on the Isle of Lewis at the northernmost tip of the Outer Hebrides. More
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