South West of Eden: A Memoir, 1932-1956

(Hardback)

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'I said many times I would not write autobiography - partly because it might signal, either to my inner self, or to others, a ""signing off"" as a writer; and partly because I did not want to mark off areas that were fact in my life from those that might yet be invented. Fiction likes to move, disguised and without a passport, back and forth across that border, and prefers it should be unmarked and without check-points.' - C K Stead. Happily for the many readers of his novels, poems, criticism and essays, C K Stead has changed his mind. In South-West of Eden, a coming-of-age memoir by New Zealand's leading poet, novelist and critic writes of a life 'lived by history' -running wild in Cornwall Park, joining the Labour Party aged seven, discovering poetry in a third-form English class and enjoying a newly married annus mirabilis in a flat on Takapuna Beach down the road from Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame. An Aucklander to the core - 'Most things of real significance in my life and the life of my family had happened somewhere in sight from the summit of Mt Eden' - Stead here turns his home town into a land of myth and symbol: Tamaki of many lovers, portage for ancient waka, wasp-waist of the fish of Maui, site of a Pakeha-planned and never built coast-to-coast canal and of the harbour-to-harbour ghost-tram, no longer running except in the head of an elderly writer, late in the night, remembering at his laptop. In a virtuoso performance, C K Stead wonderfully illuminates 23 years of his time and his place.

Reviews

"Suffused with the honesty, the insights and the narrative skills we have come to expect and hugely enjoy from Stead." --The Independent

Author Bio

From the late 1950s, the young C K Stead began to earn an international reputation as poet, literary critic - his book The New Poetic (1964) has sold over 100,0000 copies - and, later, as a novelist. In his long career he has published over 40 books and received numerous honours including, most recently, our highest honour the Order of NZ (2007) and, in 2009, a Montana NZ Book Award and the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. In 2010, he will appear at the New York PEN Writers Festival and the Auckland Writers Festival.