Stuart Hoar Biography

New Zealand playwright, born in New Plymouth, Taranaki, educated largely in Auckland. His dramatic influences are Brecht and British dramatists such as Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, and Caryl Churchill. His first full-length stage play, Squatter (1988), startled audiences and readers with its determinedly non-naturalistic exposition of a crucial moment in New Zealand history, the Liberal era of the 1890s when the Squattocracy that had commandeered enormous land holdings in Canterbury was dismantled by government reforms. Exile (1990) satirically represents the formative figures of New Zealand literature as an endlessly self-editorializing group of literati. Hoar has also written for radio, television, and film.