Biography

Elizabeth Knox - Writer
ONZM

"Like a fine wine, this novel ["The Vintner's Luck"] reveals its quality and charm in layers, providing richer rewards and delights the further one moves through it. After the initial rapture of experiencing good traditional storytelling peppered with great prose, it is the hidden depths that make this a rich and satisfying experience, one to savour again and again."
- Michael Larsen, NZ Herald

Elizabeth Knox is the author of three short novels (published together as The High Jump) and ten novels. The Vintner's Luck is her best-known work to date, winner of New Zealand's most prestigious literary prize, the Montana Book Awards' Deutz medal for fiction, and now published in eight countries.

Elizabeth's fifth novel, Black Oxen, was released in New Zealand and the US in 2001, and her sixth novel, Billie's Kiss was published in March 2002. Billie's Kiss was a finalist in the Montana Book Awards. In March 2001 Elizabeth won the prestigious Tasmania Pacific Region Prize for best novel for The Vintner's Luck, ahead of works by leading New Zealand and Australian authors. The Vintner's Luck has also been translated into French and was shortlisted for the PorixVille De Saumur in the Esprit Baccus section and developed as a screen adaptation by Nicky Caro into a film which premiered in 2009.

Elizabeth's Novel Daylight (2003) was shortlisted for Best Book in the South Pacific & South East Asian Region of the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Dreamhunter (HarperCollins, 2005) is a fast-paced and dazzlingly imaginative. It draws the reader into an extraordinary fictional world in which dreams are as vividly described as the cream cakes in the tea shop, the sand on the beach or the memories of first love. Part Two of the Dreamhunter Duet, Dreamquake, Early in 2008 Elizabeth was phoned from America to be told that Dreamquake had become a Michael Printz Honour Book. With a similar selection process to the Laureate Awards, recipients of this “Academy Awards” of children’s literature do not know their books are under consideration. Dreamquake also won an ALA Best book award in the same year.

At the end of 2008 Elizabeth released two new books. One - a limited hardback edition of The Vintener's Luck celebrating the 10th anniversary of novel, and The Love School, which collects more than twenty years of Elizabeth's non-fiction writing.

Elizabeth was the 1997 Writer in Residence at Victoria University, Wellington and in 1999 the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in Menton,France. She was made an Officer of the said Order (ONZM) in the June 2002 New Zealand Queen's Birthday Honours.

Elizabeth lives in Wellington with her husband and son.