Fiona farrell biography

Fiona Farrell was.
Fiona Farrell ONZM (born 1947) is a New Zealand poet, fiction and non-fiction writer and playwright.
Biography.

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Academy of New Zealand Literature

Fiona Farrell was born in 1947 in Oamaru and her upbringing there has featured in a number of her books, most notably in the 2011 novel Book, Book.

She is one of few New Zealand writers who have been nominated for the NZ Book Awards in all three categories—fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her first novel, The Skinny Louie Book, won the New Zealand Book Award for fiction in 1993 and four of her later novels were shortlisted for those awards. The Villa at the Edge of the Empire was shortlisted in the general non-fiction category in 2016, and her collection of poems written in Ireland, The Pop-up Book of Invasions, was a poetry finalist in 2008.

Farrell has also won awards for her short fiction and for her playwriting, and held many prestigious fellowships and residencies both here and overseas. She received the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction in 2007 and the ONZM for Services to Literature in the Queen’s Birthday Diamond Jubilee Honours list in 2012. Her 2018 public lecture, at the Auckland Writers Festival, on the political

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Academy of New Zealand Literature

Photo credit: Christchurch Press

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Appreciation

Paul Little on Fiona Farrell:

For over a decade, I’ve reviewed 70 to 90 local publications each year in North & South magazine. It’s not an unalloyed pleasure. I don’t open every package bearing a publisher’s return address in a state of high excitement. But if that package contains a new book by Fiona Farrell, my feeling of anticipation has never been disappointed.

Reviews go into a void, seldom eliciting any response. Reviewers don’t often get reviewed. But once, to my delight, I got a message from Fiona Farrell, with whom I had no previous acquaintance. She was thanking me for ‘getting’ The Villa at the Edge of the Empire:One hundred ways to read a city. How nice of her, was my first response. How could I not have? was the second. The book is a triumph of clarity and ambition fulfilled. Like all her work.

Farrell’s 1992 debut, The Skinny Louie Book, arrived without a hint of authorial trepidation and brim-full of confidence. The title gave no hint as to what sort of book

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Fiona Farrell is one of New Zealand’s leading writers, receiving critical acclaim across a variety of genres. Uniquely she has been a finalist in all three categories at the NZ Book Awards, for fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

Her first novel, The Skinny Louie Book won the 1993 New Zealand Book Award for fiction. Since then, other novels have been shortlisted for the Awards with four also nominated for the International Dublin IMPAC Award. Farrell's short fiction has appeared in the company of Alice Munro and Hanif Kureishi in two volumes of Heinemann’s Best Short Stories (ed. Gordon and Hughes), while her poems feature in major anthologies including The Oxford Book of New Zealand Poetry and Bloodaxe’s best-selling Being Alive. Her play Chook Chook is one of Playmarket New Zealand’s most frequently requested scripts. Since 2011, she has published three non-fiction titles relating to the Christchurch earthquakes: The Broken Book, The Quake Year and in 2015, The Villa at the Edge of the Empire, the factual half of a two-volume work examining the rebuilding of a city t