New Zealand Writers

BURGESS, Linda

Burgess writes with a gently ironic eye and she captures perfectly the moods and changes of the past three decades.

• Links

BURGESS, Linda (1948 - ) is a short story writer, novelist and reviewer whose stories take an ironic but tender view of the human condition. Her fictions are often characterised (and sometimes patronised) as social comedy or domestic fiction, focusing as they do on the revealing details of everyday life.

Burgess was educated at Massey University, where she was Writer in Residence in 1997. She has published two collections of short stories, Between Friends (1994) and Remember Me (1997), a novel On the Grapevine (1996), and, with Stephen Stratford, Safe Sex: An Email Romance (1997), an epistolary love story which, as the title suggests, takes place via email.

Between Friends was shortlisted for the Best First Book of Fiction section of the 1995 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Rewiewing this popular novel in the Dominion, Ruth Nichol described Burgess as "[o]ur very own Joanna Trollope... Burgess writes with a gently ironic eye and she captures perfectly the moods and changes of the past three decades."

Burgess' short fiction has appeared in journals including the NZ Listener and Metro. She was runner-up in the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Memorial Short Story Competition in 1997. Of her short fiction, Nicholas Birns writes in Antipodes: "[t]he stories, luminous and memory-filled, are a distinctive contribution to the short story form." Anne French notes in New Zealand Books that Burgess "records what she sees sharply, vividly, and with great wit."

A secondary school English teacher before turning to full-time writing in 1997, Burgess has also published two books for secondary schools: Writing and Presenting (1997), and Small Packages: New Zealand Short Stories for Secondary Schools (1999). She is a regular book reviewer on National Radio, and reviews television for the Dominion Post.

(KC. Information from author.)

Updated Information

Linda Burgess' new book is Allons Enfants (2000), the entertaining true story of her family's time living in France.

She is on the judging panel for the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

Writers in Schools

Linda Burgess is available to speak to schoolchildren of all ages as part of the Writers in Schools programme, though would be happiest with secondary schools students. The topics she is prepared to discuss are creative writing, reviewing, writing for TV, and anything to do with being a writer. She would prefer to speak to classes with 25 or fewer pupils, and will run workshops with prior arrangement.