Renowned New Zealand author Maurice Gee died on 13 June, aged 93, leaving a profound legacy in New Zealand literature. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in Literature by Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University in 1987 and held the University’s writing fellowship in 1989.
Te Herenga Waka recognised Maurice Gee for his outstanding contributions to New Zealand writing. During his 50-year career, he wrote more than 30 novels for adults and children, including his debut novel Plumb and the young adult fiction Under the Mountain.
The International Institute of Modern Letters established the Maurice Gee Prize in Children’s Writing, now known as the Maurice Gee Prize in Undergraduate Fiction, in 2002. The prize is awarded to the author of the best folio across the International Institute of Modern Letters’ undergraduate fiction workshops and has had a significant impact on the 21 emerging writers who have received it.
As one of New Zealand’s most-revered novelists, he won many awards in New Zealand and overseas, including the Fiction Prize at the New Zealand Book Awards for Plumb in 1979, Book of the Year at the AIM Children’s Book Awards for The Halfmen of O in 1982, the Deutz Medal for fiction in 1998 for Live Bodies, and the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in 2004. He received an Icon award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand in 2003.
Maurice Gee was born in Whakatāne in 1931 and grew up in West Auckland where he went to Avondale College. He studied for a Master’s degree in English at Auckland University. He became a full-time writer in 1975 after working as a teacher and librarian.
Gee once described himself as “a New Zealandy sort of writer living in a New Zealandy sort of place … writing New Zealandy sort of books.” His novels depicted life in New Zealand, and he often set them in the fictional town of Loomis, based on his hometown of Henderson. As described by Nelson Wattie in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, 1998, each of his novels “bountifully gives us a rich vision of some region and aspect of New Zealand life, and of human life in general. Each is peopled with a variety of intensely living and unique personalities together with lush images of the natural and social worlds”.
New Zealand writers pay tribute
Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters, Damien Wilkins, noted Gee’s generosity of spirit. “Maurice was a guest a few times at our creative writing workshops, and he was always very generous and curious about what new writers were up to. His novels wrestle with the big questions, most notably, how to live a good life in a crooked world. Many of his most enduring characters are reckoning with these sharp moments of moral choice. Maurice is also someone who committed himself to writing as a job. This took courage, and I do think of him as an artistic hero.”
Emeritus Professor Bill Manhire paid tribute to Gee at The Spinoff, saying, “Maurice was an extraordinarily generous writer. You can see it in the rich Dickensian range of his characters. What George Plumb learns is exactly what readers of The Halfmen of O know, that human beings are essentially “mixies,” and that those who strive to be wholly good can be as dangerous in their vehement certainties as those who set out to be entirely bad. The wisdom Plumb finds his way to — ‘Nothing human is alien to me’—is something that Maurice’s novels also subscribe to. They tell terrific stories. They have the best paragraphs and sentences. They also see what we are and do their very best to understand us and forgive.”
Publisher of Te Herenga Waka University Press and literary commentator, Fergus Barrowman, told RNZ that he read Gee's first novel when it was published in 1979. "...I was 18, and it was the first New Zealand book I read that fired my imagination and gave me a sense of how sort of diverse and interesting and challenging this country was.
"I think he had an inner core of steel and grasped his own significance, but he was also a very humble and modest man who didn't like being the centre of attention...It was really his books that he wanted to see recognised and out in the world, and the books are known internationally as well as locally."
Maurice Gee considered himself an evolutionary humanist and was an Honorary Associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. He was a strong supporter of the End of Life Choice bill.
Historian Rachel Barrowman wrote his biography, Maurice Gee: Life and Work, published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2015.
Maurice Gee is survived by his wife Margareta and children Nigel, Abigail, and Emily. He leaves a legacy with his body of work, and of his life as a prolific and principled New Zealand novelist.