“Grace’s stories make a shining and enduring place formed of the brilliant weave of Maori oral storytelling and contained within the shape of contemporary Western forms. We are welcomed in, and when we get up to leave, we have been well fed, we have made friends and family, and we are bound to understanding and knowledge of one another.”—Joy Harjo, “In Honor of Patricia Grace” (WLT 83, May 2009)
Patricia Grace (b. 1937) is the author of seven novels, five short-story collections, and several children’s books. In 2006 she received the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement. Awards for her work include the Deutz Medal for Fiction for the novel Tu at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2005, the New Zealand Fiction Award for Potiki in 1987, the Children’s Picture Book of the Year for The Kuia and the Spider in 1982, and the Hubert Church Prose Award for the Best First Book for Waiariki in 1976. She was also awarded Frankfurt’s LiBeraturpreis in 1994 for Potiki, which has been translated into several languages. Dogside Story was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Fiction Prize in 2001. Her latest novel, Chappy, was a finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Awards for fiction and winner of Nga Kupu Ora Award 2016. Her children’s book Whiti Te Ra was also a Nga Kupu Ora Award winner in 2015. Her novel Cousins is in the process of being made into a feature film. Grace was a recipient of the Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2007. She has received honorary doctorates in literature from Victoria University of Wellington in 1989 and the World Indigenous Nations University in 2016.
“Every once in a while a storyteller emerges who brings forth provocative, compassionate, and beautiful tales, the exact story-food the people need to carry them through tough, transformative times. Patricia Grace of the Maori people is one of these storytellers given to the people of Aotearoa, and now to the world as she is honored as the twentieth laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.”—Joy Harjo, “In Honor of Patricia Grace” (WLT 83, May 2009)
2008 Neustadt Jurors and Candidates |
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|---|---|---|---|---|
| JURORS | FINALISTS | |||
| Chris Abani (Nigeria/US) | Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya/US) | |||
| Sinan Antoon (Iraq/US) | Saadi Youssef (Iraq/UK) | |||
| Rilla Askew (US) | Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka/Canada) | |||
| Marcel Bénabou (Morocco/France) | Jacques Roubaud (France) | |||
| Peter Constantine (UK/US) | Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (Greece) | |||
| Joy Harjo (US) | Patricia Grace (New Zealand) | |||
| Huang Xiang (China) | Tsering Woeser (China) | |||
| Christine Montalbetti (France) | Haruki Murakami (Japan) | |||
| Bharati Mukherjee (India/US) | E. L. Doctorow (US) | |||
| Yoko Tawada (Japan/Germany) | Yoel Hoffmann (Israel) | |||
“For those who wish to develop the craft of writing, I would say: Write every day. Read every day. Write what you know and push the boundaries of what you know. You will want to explore how words work—how words can be made to work. You will want to be aware of the job that words, sentences, and paragraphs can do.”
—Patricia Grace (New Zealand), 2008 Neustadt Laureate
