Background
Born in 1951 in Pahiatua, Cox grew up in the Wairarapa and Lower Hutt area.
( As the economic reforms of the mid-1980s begin to take ...)
As the economic reforms of the mid-1980s begin to take their toll on New Zealand’s most vulnerable, Gina Tully, manager of Happy World hotela down-and-out residential hotel filled with rascals and eccentricsmust reconcile her social conscience with her need to keep her job. Emerging from this story about the downtrodden and disadvantaged is a celebration of human resilience that reminds us of the importance of intimacy and compassion.
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Born in 1951 in Pahiatua, Cox grew up in the Wairarapa and Lower Hutt area.
He worked in various jobs up until 1977. In the words of his author page on the Victoria University Press website, "His early working life reads like an author trying to find his way: advertising account executive, assembly line worker at Ford, deck hand, coalman, door-to-door turkey salesman, driver." Later, between 1977 and 1993, he worked as a bookseller in Auckland and Wellington. His first two novels, and were both written while he was working in bookstores in Wellington and Auckland.
Both these novels have Wellington settings.
From 1993, he took up work as senior writer at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. He published a number of articles during this time, but did not produce any new novels.
As of the publication of Skylark Lounge in 2000, Cox had not published a new novel since Dirty Work, thirteen years previously. The same year, he left New Zealand to become Head of Communication and Interpretation at the Jewish Museum Berlin.
While in Berlin, Cox completed his fourth novel.
The book was notable for fusing the life story of Elvis Presley and the fictional character Tarzan into a single original narrative. Cox returned to New Zealand in March 2005. His fifth novel, Responsibility (2005), set in Berlin, combined elements from noir and detective fiction with a comedic edge.
lieutenant was runner-up in the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
In 2006, Dirty Work was republished by Victoria University Press. On 28 July 2006, just four days after attending the Montana New Zealand Book Awards where he was the Fiction runner-up, he died due to cancer which he had been battling for some time.
He was working on the final draft of a sixth novel, The Cowboy Dog, when he died. lieutenant was published in November 2006.
( As the economic reforms of the mid-1980s begin to take ...)