BWB Texts: Set One
About this ebook
A bundle of the first four BWB Texts by Paul Callaghan, Maurice Gee, Kathleen Jones and Rebecca Macfie.
A moving selection of Sir Paul Callaghan’s writing, offering eloquent narratives that will endure in this country’s literature. Published on the first anniversary of Sir Paul’s death, with a foreword by Catherine Callaghan, Paul Callaghan: Luminous Moments celebrates the life of a remarkable New Zealander.
Widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s greatest fiction writers, Maurice Gee has written virtually no non-fiction. The exceptions are the two exquisite childhood reminiscences combined here into a memoir in Creeks and Kitchens.
‘I think … I am going to die’, the stunning chapter from Kathleen Jones’s biography Katherine Mansfield: The Story-teller (2010), describes Mansfield’s last days and death at chateau near Paris, the centre of a spiritual movement led by the mysterious Russian philosopher-mystic Georges Gurdjieff.
Written over a period of two years, Rebecca Macfie’s searing account of the Christchurch earthquakes, Report from Christchurch, traces the city's struggle to recover from the disaster and plan for the future. Published in association with the New Zealand Listener.
BWB Texts are short books on big subjects by great New Zealand writers. Commissioned as short digital-first works, BWB Texts unlock diverse stories, insights and analysis from the best of our past, present and future New Zealand writing.
About the author
Sir Paul Callaghan was born in Wanganui in August 1947 and died in Wellington in March 2012. He received international recognition for his scientific research in the field of nuclear magnetic resonance. In 2001 he became the thirty-sixth New Zealander to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Maurice Gee is widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s greatest authors, for both adults and children. He has received numerous awards, nominations and grants for his adult fiction, including the Wattie Award and the Montana Award, and also for his young adult and children’s books. In 2004 he received a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement. His adult novels include the Plumb trilogy, Going West, Prowlers, Live Bodies and Blindsight.
Kathleen Jones’s published work includes radio journalism, articles for magazines and newspapers, short fiction and 10 books, a mixture of biography, general non-fiction and poetry. They include biographies of the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti, Catherine Cookson, and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, along with A Passionate Sisterhood, an account of the lives of women who lived with ‘the lake poets’. She divides her time between England, Italy and New Zealand.
Rebecca Macfie is an experienced journalist who joined the New Zealand Listener in 2007 as the magazine’s South Island writer. Since starting out in journalism in 1988 she has written for the Christchurch Star, The Press, National Business Review, Independent Business Weekly, North & South, Unlimited magazine and the New Zealand Herald. She is a recent winner of the Bruce Jesson Journalism Prize in support of a book she is writing on the Pike River mining disaster. She lives in Christchurch, where she says the strange and broken has become normal.
