New Zealand Writers

RICHARDS, Ian

Richard's study of short story writer Maurice Duggan examines the writer's turbulent life and his place in the literary society of New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s.

RICHARDS, Ian (1958 - ) is a fiction writer, reviewer and is currently an associate porfessor of English at Osaka City University. He writes regularly for New Zealand magazines and journals and was shortlisted in 1999 for the Reviewer of the Year Award.

Educated at Canterbury and London Universities, Richards holds a Ph.D. in New Zealand literature from Massey University. He has published a collection of short stories, Everyday Life in Paradise (1990), and uncollected stories appear in Sport ("Sentimental Bonsai") and Landfall ("The Dunno Allergies").

Richards has also published three non-fiction literary titles: Henry James's Washington Square (1984), A Reader's Guide to the Stories of Maurice Duggan (1998) and Reading New Zealand Writing: Reviews 1990-2001 (2002).

To bed at noon (1997) is a study of short story writer Maurice Duggan. It examines Duggan's turbulent life and his place in the literary society of New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s. "[O]ne of the best books we have by and about a New Zealander," writes Michael King.

Jane Bowron describes the biography as "stunning in its detail... manages to make Duggan - who was for a large part of his life a deeply self pitying and destructive character - seem charismatic, psychologically fascinating and very likeable."

(KC. )

Updated Information

In 2004 Richards published Dark Sneaks In: Essays on the Short Fiction of Janet Frame, a collection of commentaries on Frame's major short stories, and in 2005 he published Kuromaku, a novel set in Japan. Both books were self-published through Lonely Arts Publishing and copies are available in libraries.

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