The Love School: Personal Essays

The Love School: Personal Essays - Elizabeth Knox

Victoria University Press, ISBN 978-0-86473-592-8, $35.00 pbk

The Love School collects more than twenty years of Elizabeth Knox’s non-fiction. These frank and revealing essays and talks tell the story of her writing’s beginnings, while later pieces give insights into the life of an author, and touch on the imaginative roots of Knox’s novels.

Elizabeth Knox is the author of eight novels for adults: After Z-Hour (1987), Treasure, (1992, shortlisted for the 1993 NZ Book Awards), Glamour and the Sea (1996), The High Jump: A New Zealand Childhood (Paremata 1989, Pomare 1994 and Tawa 1998), The Vintner’s Luck (1998), Black Oxen(2001), Billie’s Kiss(2002) and Daylight (April 2003). She has recently published Dreamhunter and Dreamquake (HarperCollins), a two book series for young adults. Dreamhunter won the 2006 Esther Glen Award for New Zealand children’s literature, and Dreamquake won an American Library Association Michael L. Printz Honor Award for Young Adult Literature in 2008.

One of New Zealand's most successful writers Elizabeth Knox is best known for her novel, The Vintner’s Luck. First published 1998, it was a huge bestseller in New Zealand selling more than  45 000 copies in New Zealand and over 100,00 copies worldwide.  It won the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the 1999 The Montana New Zealand Book Awards, where it also received the Readers' Choice and Booksellers' Choice awards. It was longlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize for fiction (UK) The Vintner’s Luck won the 2001 Tasmania Pacific Region Prize, and is at present being made into a film by Niki Caro. Billie’s Kiss was shortlisted in the 2002 Montana NZ Book Awards.

The sequel to The Vintner's Luck, The Angel's Cut, will be published in June 2009.