Background
Stevan Eldred-Grigg was born on October 5, 1952, in Greymouth, West Coast, New Zealand.
Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand
University of Canterbury
Acton, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Australian National University
Ballarat Rd, Footscray VIC 3011, Australia
Victoria University
(Celia Wylde sets tongues wagging and hearts breaking amon...)
Celia Wylde sets tongues wagging and hearts breaking amongst polite society in the fledgling Canterbury province. A tale of greed, lust and double dealing amongst New Zealand's ruling classes. The author has also written Oracles and Miracles, 2nd prize-winner of the 1988 Wattie awards.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140121943/?tag=2022091-20
1989
(Postmodern – or premodern? – autobiography. A book puzzli...)
Postmodern – or premodern? – autobiography. A book puzzling many reviewers. A work skipping backwards and forwards between fiction and non-fiction, between secrecy and betrayal. Critical comments have varied as always from scathing to acclamatory. David Hill: 'He proves again that he's one of our finest recorders of domestic landscapes ... always thoughtful, frequently vulnerable, constantly quotable.' Gerry Webb: 'slackly written, repetitious, preposterous, vain, snobbish, self-consciously mannered, irritatingly evasive, world weary.' Sebastian Brooke: 'Eldred-Grigg's prose style is very refined.'
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140241868/?tag=2022091-20
1994
(‘What a wonderful woman. My mother, warm and wise.’ Mum, ...)
‘What a wonderful woman. My mother, warm and wise.’ Mum, a story about a girl and a boy growing up in poverty in the postwar suburbs, is the third in the saga begun with the much-acclaimed Oracles and Miracles. The saga, which also includes The Shining City and Bangs, portrays five generations of a family and the story of an entire provincial society. Mum begins with Ginnie, now in middle age, holding the newborn daughter of her son Jimmy. Ginnie the happy grandmother. Ginnie the ‘wonderful woman.’ She has come a long way from Oracles and Miracles. But if Jimmy recalls the past as a time of peace and happiness, why does his sister Viv remember it as a nightmare? How are they both to resolve the memories which now surge into the present and demand to be resolved? And why is Ginnie herself at the heart of it all? David Eggleton: 'Stevan Eldred-Grigg has established himself through his novels and histories as the province's most significant and gifted society portrait painter.' Heather Murray: 'The marvels of Eldred-Grigg's third novel underline the wisdom of the earlier ones. ... Eldred-Grigg does not put a foot wrong.'
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00QEHTU18/?tag=2022091-20
1995
(A clever and compelling novel about illicit love and raw ...)
A clever and compelling novel about illicit love and raw passion with unexpected twists and poignant depth.Manfred Morse has just hit fifty, and also the wall. Life seems empty. His marriage is long since over, his leathery old father is in his tenth year of dying of cancer, while his colleagues play games of petty politics. Seeking stress leave from his New Zealand university, he takes a job as guest lecturer at a university in Shanghai. Here he suddenly comes face-to-face with raw passion, but in the shape of one his students, aged only eighteen. He ducks this way and that, fending off love and, when he can no longer hold out, he lashes out. The young student goes missing. The police come knocking on Manfred's door. Who is the killer? Manfred? Or is he a victim? As the story slips back and forth between the southern and northern hemispheres, Shanghai increasingly takes centre stage: a pulsing city of crowded streets and clouding smog; motley smells and mindless noise; a complex and contradictory place that leaves Manfred both horrified and aroused. This is a clever and compelling novel from a prize-winning author.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AM7FFKG/?tag=2022091-20
(An entirely new look at the shocking impact of the First ...)
An entirely new look at the shocking impact of the First World War on New Zealand.For New Zealand, World War One was wholly avoidable, wholly unnecessary - and almost wholly disastrous. Stevan Eldred-Grigg believes that the enormous cost of the war to our people was way too high - and that we still feel its effects, both socially and culturally, today. This is excellent narrative non-fiction, analysing our history in a novel way. It's very accessible but is backed up by meticulous research. Stevan goes against the accepted line and gives us a fascinating look at our social history before, during and just after WW1. Why did we go to the war in Europe? Was the country united in its desire for war? What were the economic and social consequences? What has been the impact on the psyches of New Zeland men? These and many other questions are answered in this fascinating book. In 2007 Harvey McQueen wrote in a review of New Zealand's Great War (an anthology of essays) that '[there is] a need for a general, popular history of 'our' Great War. we need a skilled writer in the mould of Sinclair, Oliver or King to give an overview and link the various elements into a coherent whole.' This is that book.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MB2EG82/?tag=2022091-20
Stevan Eldred-Grigg was born on October 5, 1952, in Greymouth, West Coast, New Zealand.
Eldred-Grigg graduated with honors from the University of Canterbury, receiving his master's degree in 1975. Three years later he obtained Doctor of Philosophy degree in history from the Australian National University.
Stevan Eldred-Grigg worked as a writing fellow at the Victoria University in 1986. Five years later he became a scholar-in-letters there. He served as a New Zealand writing fellow at the University of Iowa. Also, Eldred-Grigg was a judge of New Zealand Book Awards in 1984.
Concerning his writings, Eldred-Grigg became a well-known novelist in his native land with the 1980 publication of Oracles and Miracles, his first full-length book of fiction. It was originally planned as a work of oral history that would depict the lives of working-class women in their own words; the project evolved into a novel about two sisters, Ginnie and Fag, the former of whom remains within her working-class milieu and the latter of whom marries into the middle class.
The sequel to Oracles and Miracles, 1991’s The Shining City, deals with a later and more well-heeled generation in the same family, and partly for that reason it was deemed “disappointing” by Corballis. In 1989 Eldred-Grigg had published The Siren Celia, which was actually a reworking of an 1895 novel, A South Sea Siren, by George Chamier, with additional materials from Chamier’s Philosopher Dick and from author Sarah Amelia Courage. Taking what he found useful in these sources, altering and dramatizing the selections, Eldred-Grigg developed a postmodernist novel that attempted to shed light on Victorian society; in Corballis’s words, the novelist had “done to Chamier precisely what [George Bernard] Shaw’s Plays Unpleasant did to the Victorian well-made play.” Nevertheless, the Contemporary Novelists commentator maintained that each of Eldred-Grigg’s first three novels lacked a strong “sense of felt experience”.
A fourth novel, the 1993 Gardens of Fire, was based on the true story of the 1947 destruction by fire of Ballantynes, the most important department store in Christchurch. The novel implies that blame for the deaths of forty-one employees rested upon those in charge of the store.
A fifth novel, Mum, appeared in 1995.
Eldred-Grigg’s preoccupation with class and gender in his fiction had been presaged by his historical writings, which deal with the landed gentry of New Zealand—in the 1980 A Southern Gentry: New Zealanders Who Inherited the Earth and in Pleasures of the Flesh—and with the working class—in 1990’s New Zealand Working People, 1890-1990.
In Contemporary Novelists, Eldred-Grigg, a socialist by inclination, explained that he consciously set out, in his fiction, to correct the image of the working class that had prevailed in male-dominated New Zealand fiction to that time, in which itinerant loners and casual workers were commonplace.
His three most recent books are Diggers, Hatters & Whores, a history of gold rushes in New Zealand, The Great Wrong War, a history of New Zealand during World War I, and People, People, People, a very brief history of New Zealand from 1200 to 2000.
(Celia Wylde sets tongues wagging and hearts breaking amon...)
1989(A clever and compelling novel about illicit love and raw ...)
(An entirely new look at the shocking impact of the First ...)
(Postmodern – or premodern? – autobiography. A book puzzli...)
1994(‘What a wonderful woman. My mother, warm and wise.’ Mum, ...)
1995Quotations: "I’m a provincial writer, a writer of social comedy. My province is Canterbury, centred on the city of Christchurch. It’s the comedy of a little white world, a small society, a very precise place ... A province civil, sociable, not unconcerned with style."
Eldred-Grigg is a member of the PEN New Zealand Centre and the Canterbury Provincial committee.
Quotes from others about the person
"Stevan Eldred-Grigg defies classification. He can swoop from the historical to the contemporary, from lyric to polemic, from fiction to faction. He's unsettling as well as absorbing." - David Hill
Eldred-Grigg married Lauree Arlene Hunter on November 13, 1976, but their marriage ended in divorce in 1994. He has three sons.