Owen Marshall is a New Zealand writer, novelist, poet, and editor. A traditional realist and an impressionist at once, he writes about lower-middle-class New Zealanders in small-town or rural settings reflecting their psychological background.
One of his most known writings is a novel titled ‘The Larnachs’.
Background
Owen Marshall was born as Owen Marshall Jones on August 17, 1941, in Te Kuiti, New Zealand. He is the third son of Alan Jones, a Methodist minister, and Jane Jones.
Lieutenant General Richard Rhys Jones is Marshall's half-brother.
Education
Owen Marshall spent his early years and childhood in Blenheim and Timaru. Raised in a family where both literature and physical experience were appreciated, he inherited the passion for books and nature from his father.
Marshall received his secondary education at Timaru Boys High School. From 1960 to 1963, Marshall studied at the University of Canterbury which provided him with a Master of Arts degree in history. A year after graduation, he received a diploma in teaching from Christchurch College of Education.
In 2002, he obtained an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from his alma mater, the University of Canterbury.
Owen Marshall started his career as a teacher although he combined it with his writing activity. His early attempts at novels went unpublished. Turning to the short story form in the 1970s, he first achieved magazine publication with a story in the New Zealand Listener in 1977. Two years later, Marshall was able to publish a volume of fourteen stories ‘Supper Waltz Wilson and Other New Zealand Stories’. Although he subsidized publication with his own funds, the book was critically and commercially a success.
Soon the author was publishing regularly in notable New Zealand literary outlets, some of his stories were also aired on Radio New Zealand. A second collection, ‘The Master of Big Jingles and Other Stories’, was published in 1982 by Mclndoe, the Dunedin house which was to see Marshall’s next five collections into print.
In the title stories of the first two collections, Marshall was establishing his voice as a traditional realist who wrote about lower-middle-class New Zealanders in small-town or rural settings that were so well-described as to become virtual characters in their own right.
From 1983 to 1985, the author served as a deputy and acting rector at Waitaki Boys' High School in Oamaru. Then, beginning in 1986, he worked as a deputy principal at Craighead Diocesan School in Timaru for five years.
The third collection of Marshall stories, ‘The Day Hemingway Died’, followed in 1984. The writer changed direction, at least temporarily, in his fourth volume, ‘The Lynx Hunter and Other Stories’ published three years later. He experimented with postmodern meta-fictional forms, an approach that was popular with New Zealand short-story writers in the late 1980s. Another volume of selected stories, ‘The Divided World’, was issued in 1989. Though the title story was nonrealistic, the bulk of these pieces and of his later stories showed the author as, according to a reviewer W. S. Broughton, “still primarily a teller of tales.”
Stories written after that selected volume were published in ‘Tomorrow We Save the Orphans’ and ‘The Ace of Diamonds Gang’. Additionally, in 1992, while on a Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, Marshall wrote a novel, ‘A Many Coated Man’, which became his first published novel three years later. It was a view of a near-future New Zealand in which the national identity was in even greater flux than at the time of writing, though it displayed Marshall’s considerable literary skill and talent for the short form.
At the beginning of the 1990s, after serving as the University of Canterbury's Writer in Residence, Owen Marshall abandoned full-time teaching and devoted all his time to writing. The selection of Marshall’s short stories, ‘The Best of Owen Marshall’, saw the print at Random House in 1997.
One of the remarkable events in Marshall’s career of an author during the next decade was 2006 Les Belles Etranges festival organized by the French Centre National du Livre (French National Center of Book) as well as it subsequent tour, anthology, and documentary. From 2007 to 2008, he was the President of Honour of the New Zealand Society of Authors.
In addition to many books that Marshall published the following years, he has also composed two anthologies, ‘Essential New Zealand Short Stories’ and ‘Best New Zealand Fiction #6’, and worked on ‘Timeless Land’ dedicated to the Central South Island of New Zealand with painter Grahame Sydney and poet Brian Turner.
Nowadays, Owen Marshall lives and works in Timaru, New Zealand.
Owen Marshall is a member of the New Zealand Society of Authors.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"New Zealand’s best prose writer." Vincent O’Sullivan, poet, writer, playwright, critic, and editor
"Marshall is distinctive among New Zealand writers [...] for his quiet ironic detachment, and for the cleareyed recognitions of inevitability and common culpability in his little scenes from the human comedy." W. S. Broughton, reviewer and critic
"[Marshall's] writings seek to remind us of the known and the forgotten alike; their narrative vision suggests the wish to reveal sympathies that are never sentimental, seldom other than compassionate, and always couched in the language of one who is thoroughly sensitive to the power of words." W. S. Broughton, reviewer and critic
"I find myself exclaiming over and again with delight at the precision, the beauty, the near perfection of his writing." Fiona Kidman, novelist, poet, scriptwriter, and author.
"Quite simply the most able and the most successful exponent of the short story currently writing in New Zealand." Michael King, historian, author, and biographer
"Marshall weighs his words as if regarding you with a raised ironic eyebrow. The poems employ the same bluff, resilient, yet harmonious language as Marshall’s prose." David Eggleton, poet and writer
"Marshall is a writer who speaks with equal intensity to the unbearable loveliness and malevolence of life." Carolyn Bliss, World Literature Today
Connections
Owen Marshall married Jacqueline Hill in December 1965. The family produced two daughters.