New Zealand Writers
KENNEDY, Anne
Places, possessions and colours feature strongly as people try to make sense of memory and create connectedness.
Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). About the Companion entries View list of Companion contributors
KENNEDY, Anne (1959– ), is a writer of fiction and filmscripts, one of the most successful of the innovative younger postmodernists.
Born and educated in Wellington, she has been a piano teacher and music librarian and since 1986, a freelance scriptwriter and editor, co-writing with Peter Wells and others. Her short fiction has been chosen for most recent anthologies, but has not yet been collected. 100 Traditional Smiles (1988) is ‘a brief work of fiction in many small sections’.
Her novella, Musica Ficta (1993), plays ingeniously between music and language, between the medieval and the modern, and between New York, Auckland and wartime Nottingham. It, too, is constructed of short, apparently discontinuous fragments, using multiple points of view, some in verse, some with the lyric intensity of haiku, often dependent on wordplay (‘During a London peasouper a woman disappeared into thin air’). Places, possessions and colours feature strongly as people try to make sense of memory and create connectedness.
Kennedy’s essay in The Source of the Song (ed. Mark Williams, 1995) comments on her Catholicism, including reference to Musica Ficta. The influence of film and television is evident throughout her work, as well as a rich weaving of musical elements and allusions, including in Musica Ficta parodic entries for the Oxford Companion to Music.
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Anne Kennedy won the Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award in 1985 and was the University of Auckland Literary Fellow in 1995.
Kennedy has also published a novel, A Boy and His Uncle (Picador, 1998) and written the screenplay for the film Monkey's Mask, from the verse novel by Dorothy Porter.
Her first book of poetry, Sing-Song (Auckland University Press, 2003) is described as an extraordinary and unusual sequence of poems. Told from a mother's point of view, the poems deal with the domestic life of a family, in particular the gruelling experience of eczema from which the little girl suffers.
Sing-Song won the poetry category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004.
The Time of the Giants is Kennedy's second sequence of poems and is much less tied to the poet's own experience (AUP, 2005). Wonderfully inventive and both moving and amusing; it focuses on a family of giants and in particular a young woman giant and her efforts to conceal from her lover (normal size) just how tall she really is. Characteristically this fabulous tale also includes gentle satire on contemporary manners, witty language and a warm, affectionate tone. It was nominated in the 2006 shortlist for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
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