New Zealand Writers

PETTIS, Ruth

Pettis has a rare quality of voice; her touch leaves no fingerprints and her characters compel the pages to be turned quickly
Laura Keddell

PETTIS, Ruth (1955 – ) is a fiction writer and poet. She was born in Waipawa in the Hawke’s Bay and has worked as journalist, script writer for the Natural History Unit (now known as Natural History New Zealand Ltd). Pettis works as a full time fiction writer.

Her first novel Like Small Bones (Hazard Press, 2004) was published in 2004 and traces the separate lives of Gerald and Violet, both made vulnerable by harsh childhoods. Set in the South Island, Like Small Bones covers three generations, interweaving stories of loss and grief. Reviewing the novel in New Zealand Books (Dec, 2004), Joan Rosier-Jones writes that ‘Like Small Bones is remarkable; sure-footed and slow-moving, but never sluggish … it is, in effect, an historical novel but the handling is far from traditional as the narrative weaves effortlessly through time and place.’

Like Small Bones was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for a first novel. Ruth Pettis held the Robert Burns Fellowship at Otago University in 2006.

Ruth Pettis is a pseudonym.

(KM)

• Like Small Bones is published by Hazard Press