Truth be told

Sue McCauley has never shied away from bucking convention and in her new novel, the now 81-year-old has plenty to say on society and ageing.

- SARAH CATHERALL

Sue McCauley sits in her home office, in the spot where she used to sleep as a child growing up on her family farm, east of Dannevirke.

The award-winning author is doing her first Zoom interview to talk about her new novel, Landed, which has taken two decades, on and off, to get from page to print. At 81, she finds technology a big annoyance - her book's protagonist, Briar, moans about it a lot - and McCauley wishes she had listened enough to her 50-something daughter to work out how to change the camera angle so I can see more of the room.

For more than six decades, McCauley worked as a journalist, scriptwriter and award-winning novelist. One of her first paid jobs was as a Listener journalist in the early 1960s, when women were a rarity in newsrooms. She segued into fiction writing to get her opinions on the page without censorship and also because society made it difficult to be a working mother at the time.

Describing herself today as "a slack writer on a pension", she blinks into the Zoom screen and nods that Landed will be her last book. She is not long back from senior aerobics. She's healthy for her age, although she has poor hearing and eyesight.

It is just as well she is active, as she is increasingly caring for her husband, Pat Hammond, 66, who has motor neurone disease. It was diagnosed about three years ago, and he moves around the house with a stick or leaning on McCauley, who says: "It's a horrible condition... I need to be healthy because I'm his caregiver now."