Gee, Maurice

(NZ, 1931– )

Gee has worked as a teacher and librarian, and is one of New Zealand's best-known novelists. He also writes for children and for television. Plumb (1978, winner of the James Tait Black Prize) is the first in a trilogy about a New Zealand family, which covers five generations, and over 100 years of New Zealand history, dealing with the sharply differing perspectives of different individuals, and with wider historical and political developments. In Going West (1992) narrator Jack Skeat attempts to solve the mysteries in the life of his dead friend, a famous poet and ne'er-do-well, born in the same year as himself. In Live Bodies (1998) Joseph Mandl, an Austrian Jew now living in New Zealand, reviews his past, when he fought the Nazis in the streets of Vienna, and was later interned as an enemy alien in the New Zealand where he had sought refuge.

Patrick White, Nadine Gordimer, Thomas Keneally  JR