Writer
Biography
Maurice Gee - Writer"One of my central obsessions is the difficulty of connecting, and my novels are partly about that. Love runs into all sorts of difficulties."
Maurice Gee was born in Whakatane in 1931 and passed much of his childhood in the country town of Henderson-a town that finds many fictional equivalents in his writing. Particularly significant for Maurice was Henderson Creek where, he said, "I seem to have spent half my boyhood", and which represents "a place of marvelous and terrible things".
Maurice gained an MA in English Literature in 1954 and initially worked as a schoolteacher in Paeroa, but found little to enjoy in the profession. He spent 1961 teaching and writing in England, partly supported by a grant from the New Zealand Literary Fund, a testimony to his growing literary status.
A year later The Big Season, Gee's first novel, was published. Patterns and themes that would shape later books are already there: tension between family members, violence as an unavoidable fact of life, social constraint and inner freedom. Gee's literary breakthrough came with the publication of the trilogy - Plumb (1978), Meg (1981) and Sole Survivor (1983) which provide a broadly conceived image of life in New Zealand over three generations. Plumb is widely considered one of New Zealand's finest novels.
Maurice soon added another string to his bow by venturing into writing for children. As a result of this, many of the children growing up with Maurice's hugely captivating children's books such as Under the Mountain have also turned into enthusiastic readers of his adult work.
Books published from the mid-1980s proved that here was a novelist working at the height of his imaginative powers. With Prowlers (1987) and The Burning Boy (1990), Gee confirmed the skills he developed to a high art: the historical novel grounded firmly in the present, and the complex novel of social life. Going West (1993) is similarly significant for its exploration of the nature of literary creation, while Live Bodies(1998) crowns Maurice's success by winning the Deutz Medal for Fictionat the 1998 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. In 2002 Maurice washonoured by the Children's Literature Foundation for his contributionto children's fiction.
Since receiving his Icon Award in 2003 Maurice Gee has gone on to publish The Scornful Moon(Penguin Books, 2003), which was shortlisted for Best Book in the SouthPacific & South East Asian Region of the 2004 Commonwealth WritersPrize.
Maurice Gee was the winner of 2004 the Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Much-loved Book with his fantasy classic Under the Mountain. The film Fracture, based on the novel Crime Story by Maurice Gee, was released throughout New Zealand in June 2004.
In My Father's Den was made into a feature film and also released in New Zealand in 2004; The Scornful Moonwas a runner up in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand BookAwards 2004 and in 2004 Maurice Gee received a $60,000 Prime Minister'sAwards for Literary Achievement for fiction and in the same yearreceived an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University ofAuckland.Blindsight (2005), won the Deutz Medal for ficton, in the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and Salt(Penguin New Zealand, 2007), has been nominated in the Young Adultfiction section of the 2008 New Zealand Post Book Awards for Childrenand Young Adults.
Salt won the Young Adult Category in the 2008 New Zealand Post Book of the Year Awards.