Stephanie Johnson

The Writers' Festival (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A couple of years ago, Stephanie Johnson wrote a highly entertaining novel about a writing class at an Auckland tertiary institution. It featured a wide cast of characters, some trenchant satire, a good deal of humanity and carried just a whiff of roman a clef. Her latest, The Writers' Festival, is the sequel (although it stands alone perfectly well). It features many of the same characters, a few new ones, even more trenchant and mischievous satire and the same sense that the author - herself the longserving (not to say suffering) director of the Auckland Writers' Festival - has created for herself the opportunity for some much-needed catharsis. . . Only a writer of Johnson's ability could keep so many narrative balls in the air with such deceptive ease. She once described the writing of fiction (when it is going well) as a form of legal hallucination, and her prose these days has that quality - the characters and reality she creates are completely believable despite the aura of farce flickering at the margins. . . She is just as generous to her peers in New Zealand letters here as she was in The Writing Class . . . There are some hilarious episodes. . . But there is also much poignancy. . . The uneasy nexus of art and commerce is always there . . . And although Johnson lives and breathes books, she is no mere sentimentalist: the place and importance of writers and writing in the digital world and in the brutal world we inhabit provide the ballast to all that entertaining sail.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Penguin Random House NZ
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 22. April 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781775537991
• Artikelnr.: 55931428

Autorenporträt

Stephanie Johnson is the author of several collections of poetry and of short stories, some plays and adaptations, and many fine novels. The New Zealand Listener commented that 'Stephanie Johnson is a writer of talent and distinction. Over the course of an award-winning career - during which she has written plays, poetry, short stories and novels - she has become a significant presence in the New Zealand literary landscape, a presence cemented and enhanced by her roles as critic and creative writing teacher.' The Shag Incident won the Montana Deutz Medal for Fiction in 2003, and Belief was shortlisted for the same award. Stephanie has also won the Bruce Mason Playwrights Award and Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, and was the 2001 Literary Fellow at the University of Auckland. Many of her novels have been published in Australia, America and the United Kingdom. She co-founded the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival with Peter Wells in 1999. She is the 2023 recipient of the Prime Minister's Award for Literature. The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature describes Johnson's writing as 'marked by a dry irony, a sharp-edged humour that focuses unerringly on the frailties and foolishness of her characters . . . There is compassion, though, and sensitivity in the development of complex situations', and goes on to note that 'a purposeful sense of . . . larger concerns balances Johnson's precision with the small details of situation, character and voice that give veracity and colour'.