New Zealand Writers

RANDERSON, Jo

Her ability to shift from near-realism to humorous neo-gothic and the absolutely absurd makes her a true pioneer of the post-something generation.
- Federico Monsalve, Listener, 2000

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RANDERSON, Jo (1973 – ) is a fiction writer, playwright, theatre director and performer.

She was born in Auckland and grew up in Wellington, where she gained a BA in Theatre and Film from Victoria University of Wellington, and was awarded the prize for best portfolio in Bill Manhire’s creative writing course in 1996. She is the founder and Artistic Director of Barbarian Productions, a Wellington-based theatre production company.

Randerson writes short stories and prose poems, often with a philosophical theme. She has a sharp ear for dialogue and is interested in experimental forms.

Reviewer Margot Schwass, writing about Randerson’s first short story collection The Spit Children in The Evening Post, comments that Randerson’s ‘narrative voices are wonderful – funny, troubled, yet cracking hardy: “Just then the head of her doll came off accidentally in my hands. I said I was very sorry but she told me to go home now because she was bored of me”’.

Randerson's published books are The Knot (Wedge Press, 1998), The Spit Children (Victoria University Press, 2000), and The Keys to Hell (Victoria University Press, 2004). She is the author of numerous plays; those published include Fold (The Play Press, 2004), and Banging Cymbal, Clanging Gong in Red Light Means Stop (Women’s Play Press, 2003). She has also been widely published in literary journals such as Sport, Landfall and Glottis, and anthologies, including The Picnic Virgin (VUP, 1999).

In a review for The Keys to Hell in Landfall 209 Anna Smith writes that ‘Randerson’s world is a “holding tank” inside which we shriek, or remain terrified and mute witnesses to the despair that is life – a theme rehearsed over and over. Provocation, not subtlety, is the writer’s special effect’.

Randerson won the Sunday Star Times Bruce Mason Award for playwriting in 1997 and was the 2001 Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University.

Jo Randerson lives in Wellington.

(KM)

Her short story 'The Sheep, The Shepherd' appears in The Best of New Zealand Fiction. Volume Three

(Vintage, 2006).