New Zealand Writers

KNOX, Elizabeth

Photo by Victoria Birkenshaw (2008)

The emphasis lies on intensely rendered detail, on capturing a succession of highly charged moments.

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

KNOX, Elizabeth (1959– ), is a full-time fiction writer who defines her bearings in time and space as ‘conviction and glee’. Her style is poetic and intense. The title of her first novel, After Z-Hour (1987), stands for ‘zero hour’ (usually the scheduled time for the start of a military operation), a moment of intense significance for all characters involved.

Because of a storm, six characters, of whom three are also narrators, spend time together in an old house. A seventh character is the ghost of Mark Thornton, a young New Zealander who fought in France during World War 1 and who died shortly after returning to New Zealand.

The plot strands of her second novel, Treasure (1992; shortlisted for the 1993 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction), are set in Wellington and in the Christian settlement of White Steppes, North Carolina, and involve the doings of charismatic Christians, faith healing, museum management and a love story between a postgraduate student in English and her supervisor, which lends it also an element of the campus novel.

A third novel, Glamour and the Sea (1996), gradually unveils a mystery set in and around Wellington during the 1940s. It focuses on the lives of New Zealand women in their involvement with American men. All novels are characterised by an absence of a linear plot and a variety of time-frames, settings and narrative voices.

In addition to these three novels, Knox has published a trilogy of novellas which offer finely observed moments of a girl’s childhood and emergent adolescence. Paremata (1989) and Pomare (1994) are partly based on autobiographical experiences of a childhood near Wellington, in 1969 and 1966 respectively. Both concentrate on two sisters, Jo and Lex Keene, and their family, friends and neighbours. The trilogy was completed by Tawa (1998).

Knox has been co-editor of and a frequent contributor to Sport. Born in Wellington and a graduate in English of Victoria University, she has won several awards and fellowships, including the ICI Young Writers Bursary, a Scholarship in Letters (1993) and the Victoria University writing fellowship (1997). A further novel, The Vintner’s Luck, was accepted in 1998 for American and international publication. HT

Updated Information

The Vintner's Luck, Elizabeth Knox (first published Victoria University Press, 1998)
Set in Burgandy in the nineteenth century, The Vintner's Luck tells the magical, spellbinding story of Sobran Jodeau, a vintner from the village of Aluze. On a midsummer's night, Sobran's life is forever changed when he is visited by an angel named Xas, a gorgeous creature with wings that smell of snow.

The Vintner's Luck won the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the 1999 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, where it also received the Readers' Choice and Booksellers' Choice awards. It was also shortlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize and in 2001 it was awarded the inaugural Tasmania Pacific Region Prize.

Knox's three volumes of autobiographical writing, Paremata, Pomare, and Tawa are now collected as The High Jump: a New Zealand Childhood (2000).

Elizabeth Knox was the recipient of a 2000 Arts Foundation Laureate Award. 'Elizabeth Knox's achievement is already considerable with the break-through success of The Vintner's Luck,' says Arts Foundation panel member and poet Bill Manhire. 'We believe she is about to become a major international writer.'

About Black Oxen (2001) the Guardian's Sarah May writes: 'The new book by acclaimed New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox is as crowded as you would expect a novel on the question of human destiny to be. . . '

'Complex without being complicated, Black Oxen possesses a pure and whole-hearted intelligence. As in The Vintner's Luck, Knox demonstrates an imagination that is both vast and relentless in its pursuit of the truth. This is a world with four dimensions and six senses. Any leap of faith it might require is more than worth taking.'

The Boston Globe found Black Oxen 'even more lush, dark, and puzzling' than The Vintner's Luck.

'Knox has provocative, disturbing things to say about how we define identity. She is obsessed with consciousness, sensation, memory, and the ways in which families mold, adapt, and define themselves. Her idiosyncratic stylistic impulses, though often irritating, are suave and assured, and she has a dead-on eye for atmospherics and the telling landscape.'

'The poor beasts of Knox's title sometimes have a heavy load to haul in this long, challenging, even exasperating novel, but readers who share their diligence and patience will be startled to find out where the journey takes them and strangely satisfied at its end.'

James Urquhart in the Independent on Sunday, ends his long review: 'Knox bothers her readers with tenderness, suspense and glistening webs of meaning, but rewards, in the round, with a superb piece of narrative therapy.'

Billie's Kiss (2002) is set on the remote, divided Scottish island of Kissack and Skilling, one half of which looks historically and geographically towards Catholic Ireland, the other towards the Protestant north and Scandinavia.

In the 2002 New Zealand Queen's Birthday honours list, Knox was awarded an ONZM for her services to literature.

Billie's Kiss was short listed in the 2002 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

Daylight (2003) was described in the Publishers Weekly as "on a par with the best Anne Rice has to offer." Daylight is set on the beautiful Mediterranean Coast, yet much of it takes place in a "world beneath the world" where history meets myth and vampires hearts still beat.

Elizabeth Knox's novel Daylight, now published in the USA, has received an enthusiastic notice in The Washington Post. Douglas E Winter, author of the critical biography Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic, praises Knox for revitalising 'a weary genre'
'But fantasies, Knox suggests, are mirrors of reality, and do not exist without consequences. Doomed to night and shadow, her vampires offer the ominous prospect that progress is the true monster and remind us that daylight and illumination are very different things. In Daylight, Elizabeth Knox has written a Northanger Abbey for the new century, an entertaining fiction that offers a potent summation and critique of a weary genre. Her style is meticulous and dreamlike, moving with a languor worthy of its nightwalkers. She demands and deserves a careful reading, because there is no doubt: Daylight is not just another vampire novel.' The Washington Post

Daylight (2003) was shortlisted for Best Book in the South Pacific & South East Asian Region of the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Dreamhunter is Elizabeth Knox's latest novel (HarperCollins, 2005). Fast-paced and dazzlingly imaginative, it draws the reader into an extraordinary fictional world in which dreams are as vividly described as the cream cakes in the tea shop, the sand on the beach or the memories of first love. It was nominated in the 2006 shortlist for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards and won the 2006 Esther Glen Award for a work considered to be the most distinguished contribution to New Zealand Children's literature. It is New Zealand's longest running book award.

The judging panel said of Knox, 'Few writers can make the transition from the extravagances of writing for adults to the conciseness necessary when writing for children and young adults, yet Elizabeth Knox has achieved this with Dreamhunter. The plot is brilliantly original and convincing, and the writing is superb.'
Dreamhunter was selected as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults 2007. The Best Books list is compiled by a committee of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a
division of the American Library Association.

Part Two of the Dreamhunter Duet, Dreamquake, was published in 2007 by Harper Collins. It concludes the duet in the same spirit of deeply imagined and ingeniously constructed story that is both part myth and fairytale. 'Knox not only generates a riveting mystery and a forcefully original myth of place, but raises some challenging questions about power and freedom, artistic licence, the role of the storyteller, and the way that both history and the future are constructed around dreams and fantasies of one sort or another'

Dreamquake won a Michael L Printz Award in 2008 and an ALA Best book award in the same year.