Heaphy

Heaphy - Iain Sharp

Auckland University Press, ISBN 978-1-86940-421-5, $65.00 hbk

The first New Zealander to win the Victoria Cross, the first Pakeha to explore the West Coast of the South Island and New Zealand’s most distinguished nineteenth-century landscape painter: by any measure, Charles Heaphy was a central figure in colonial New Zealand. In this engaging book, lavishly illustrated with Charles Heaphy’s paintings, drawings and maps, Iain Sharp reveals the story of Heaphy’s art and life.

Journalist, poet, critic, historian and librarian Iain Sharp was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1953, and moved to Auckland, New Zealand, with his family, in 1961. He has lived in Auckland ever since, apart from short stints in Wellington, where he taught at Victoria University of Wellington, and in England.

Dr Sharp has a PhD in English Literature (Jacobean comedy) from The University of Auckland and has been a journalist and critic for magazines and newspapers for over 20 years. From 1995 to 2005 he edited the books pages of the national Sunday newspaper the Sunday Star-Times, winning the national review award in 1995, 1996 and 1999. He wrote the chapter on New Zealand for The Oxford Guide toContemporary World Literature edited by John Sturrock (OUP, 1996) and the text for Real Gold: Treasures of the Auckland City Libraries (Auckland University Press, 2007).

Iain Sharp still writes reviews and articles for the Sunday Star-Times and also works as a manuscripts librarian in the Special Collections section of the Auckland City Libraries.