Come and hear me read tomorrow night in Iowa City with the brilliant Michelle Falkoff – we’ll be at Prairie Lights.
I’ve recently done two interviews about The Eternal City – one is up on the excellent Australian blog Pop.Edit.Lit, and the other is on the US site New in Books.
My new essay book, On Coming Home, was reviewed today in the Sunday Star-Times in New Zealand, and the review is posted online here.
I’ll be returning to Iowa City next month to teach at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival: I’m teaching two week-long workshops and one weekend workshop. More details here. Also, my good friend Michelle Falkoff and I will be giving a reading in the famous Prairie Lights Bookstore on the evening of Tuesday, July 7th. We’re both reading from new YA novels.
I’m posting updates about my residency in Denmark at my blog, www.trendybutcasual.typepad.com. It’s proving a fantastic place to write so far – with the YA novel set in Rome just completed.
I’m off to speak at a Gothic Fiction symposium in Lancaster, taking place tomorrow, September 27th, at the university there. Other featured authors include Chris Priestley, Celia Rees, Marcus Sedgwick and Sarah Singleton.
My first novel for children will be published by Puffin (Penguin NZ) on August 21st. It’s called Hene and the Burning Harbour, and is the second title in the New Zealand Girl series launching in August. Very excited!
Later this week I’m appearing at a few events at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, including a YA reading on Friday May 17th.
I’m also going to be an MC at the Schools Day programme on May 16th, so if you’re in coming in for one of those events, make sure you say hi to me!
Thanks to the great blog Backyard Books for an in-depth discussion of RUINED and some of my other work. There are lots of links on the page, too, for those of you with burning questions this web site doesn’t answer!
I have a couple of new things posted online this week. The first is a blog post on ‘Inspired Openings’ for a great YA publishing site.
The second is quite different, a review of for Landfall Online of Your Unselfish Kindness: Robin Hyde’s Autobiographical Writings, edited by Mary Edmond-Paul. Hyde is an important New Zealand writer from the early part of the twentieth century, and I found this new collection fascinating.
UNBROKEN, the sequel to RUINED, is now available in book stores in the US, and has this review from Kirkus. I’ve also got a Wikipedia page now – useful for those site visitors doing a school report! – and there’s a new page on this site as well, Writing Services, for anyone seeking manuscript assessments or help with editing, copywriting, social media, etc.