Stuff of fantasy

They may not win critical plaudits and they might fly under our radars, but a growing number of NZ genre fiction writers are in huge demand internationally.

- RICHARD BETTS

We know the big names, the ones who win the Ockhams or other major awards. We know Eleanor Catton and Maurice Gee, Becky Manawatu, CK Stead and Emily Perkins. Fewer of us know Sarah A Parker, Kate O’Keeffe or Jayne Castel, yet all three are among a small handful of New Zealand-born authors who make a better-than-good living solely from their books.

Kiwis are readers – more than 85,000 people attended ticketed events at the recent Auckland Writers Festival, and between them bought 11,000 books – but there just aren’t enough of us to support our own fiction writers.

For Aotearoa-based authors to be commercially successful, they must look internationally: Stacy Gregg signed early on with HarperCollins UK for what would become multiple series of pony-themed books for tweens; Nicky Pellegrino is represented by Hachette UK for her novels, often set in Italy.

Genre romance writer Nalini Singh sells multitudes internationally for the Harlequin imprint; crime writer Ben Sanders has a deal with HarperCollins and has been shortlisted five times for crime fiction’s Ngaio Marsh Awards. His 2015 novel, American Blood, was optioned by Warner Bros, but Sanders still earns his main crust as a structural engineer.

Over the past decade, other writers have turned to self-publishing online, writing to market and maintaining a ferocious output that keeps readers wanting more. In most cases, those readers want more romance books, and Parker (fantasy), O’Keeffe (comedy) and Castel (historical) all offer variations on a theme of love.