Dear Alison

NON-FICTION FINALIST

Dear Alison
Simon Pollard (editor)
Penguin NZ
ISBN 978-0-14330-460-9 hb RRP $30.00
Target age 5+

In July 1942, with a notebook and pencil he had bought from a German guard, Dudley Muff started a very special diary. Dudley was 42 and a  prisoner of war in Stalag XVIIIB in Germany when he wrote this diary for his niece, Alison. Miraculously, the diary survived the war and now serves as a poignant account of one New Zealand soldier’s determination to survive at all costs.

Simon Pollard is Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at Canterbury Museum and Adjunct Professor of Science Communication at the University of Canterbury. In 2007, Simon discovered that the original of the diary that his great uncle Dudley Muff wrote while he was a prisoner-of-war in Germany was at Canterbury Museum. After Penguin New Zealand agreed to publish the diary, Simon spent 18 months, in his spare time, writing an introduction and epilogue to help put the diary in perspective almost 70 years after the end of the war.