Discussing Fiction with Elizabeth Knox

03 October 2016

Discussing Fiction with Elizabeth Knox

Photo Caption: Elizabeth Knox will deliver the 14th annual Frank Sargeson Memorial Lecture this month.

Fiction as blender and centrifuge, as the weather inside the house, as maelstrom and wormhole – what we hope it can do to and for us and where it can take us, forms the theme behind this year’s Frank Sargeson Memorial Lecture at the University of Waikato.

To be presented by the novelist, essayist, and memoirist Elizabeth Knox, the 14th annual public lecture on October 12th will look at the freedoms and strictures of fiction and non-fiction.

“In my talk I’m going to explore the notions of subject-matter, audience, and authenticity – then I’ll kick them around the room and talk about getting away with writing crazy stuff, and why anyone would want to,” says Knox.

Knox is the author of twelve novels and three novellas. Her book The Vintner’s Luck won the Deutz Medal for Fiction in the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the Tasmania Pacific Region Prize, and her book for young adults, Dreamhunter, won the 2006 Esther Glen Medal. Dreamhunter’s sequel, Dreamquake (2007), was a Michael L Printz Honor book for 2008 and, in the same year, was named an ALA, a CCBC, Booklist, and a New York Library best book. A collection of essays, The Love School, won the biography and memoir section of the New Zealand Post book awards in 2009. Her third young adult title, Mortal Fire, won the YA section of the New Zealand Post Children’s book award and was a finalist in the LA Times Book Awards. Her horror/science fiction, Wake, was published in New Zealand in 2013 and in the UK in 2015. Knox was the recipient of the 2014 Michael King Fellowship.

Elizabeth Aitken Rose, Chairperson of the Sargeson Trust, is looking forward to this year’s talk.

“These lectures commemorate Sargeson’s place in New Zealand’s literary canon, his mentorship of writers, including Janet Frame and C.K. Stead, and his formative years in Hamilton. Elizabeth’s lecture on fiction and audience extends Sargeson’s provocative legacy into the next generation”, she says.

The 14th annual Frank Sargeson Memorial Lecture ‘Seeing Us Safely Nowhere’ by Elizabeth Knox takes place on Wednesday, October 12 at 5.30pm in S.1.04 (S Block, University of Waikato). Co-hosted by the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences and the Friends of Hamilton Public Library Association. The lecture is free and open to the public.

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