New Zealand Writers

BENNETT, Joe

Popular columnist and travel writer.

Bennett, Joe (1957 – ) is a columnist and travel writer. Born in Eastbourne, England, Bennett was educated at the University of Cambridge and worked for many years teaching English. He has been a full-time freelance writer since 1998 and his columns are syndicated in newspapers throughout New Zealand. Bennett has lived in New Zealand since 1987.

Nine collections of Bennett’s columns have been published. The first, Just Walking the Dogs (1998), sets the tone for the eight subsequent collections – all have dog references in the titles. The first of his travel books, A Land of Two Halves (2004), finds Bennett hitchhiking around New Zealand looking for what it is that is keeps him living here. His second travel book, Mustn’t Grumble (2006), finds Bennett back in his country of origin, following the trail that writer HV Morton took 80 years ago in search of the ‘real England’.

Reviewing Mustn’t Grumble in the Listener, Harry Ricketts writes that ‘Bennett is enjoyably severe on “Tesco’s England” with its aisles of vacuum-packed Englishness, each shelf shiny with mass-produced heritage – a huge variety of all the same. Bennett’s view, to travesty Yeats, might be summed up as “Romantic England’s dead and gone,/It’s with H V Morton in the grave” – with the brusque rider that romantic England never really existed anyway.’

Joe Bennett lives in Lyttelton, Christchurch.

(KM)

Updated Information

Where Underpants Come From: From Checkout to Cotton Field - Travels Through the New China (HarperCollins Publishers, 2008) sheds light on the mystery of global commerce as Bennett takes the reader on a humourous and informative journey through the economics and exchanges of the one of the worlds fastest growing countries.

Links:
Joe Bennett’s web page http://www.joebennett.co.nz/