Philip Temple - The life of Maurice Shadbolt

New Zealand journalist and award-winning author Maurice Shadbolt believed New Zealanders should tell their own stories - and now his story is being told in Life as a Novel: A biography of Maurice Shadbolt, Volume One 1932 to 1973, written by Philip Temple. Temple knew Shadbolt and tells of his political activism, his close friendships with other artists of his time including James K Baxter and Colin McCahon, and his increasingly fraught personal life. Temple himself is a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction and over the years he has been awarded several fellowships, including the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship (1979), the Robert Burns Fellowship (1980), the 1996 NZ National Library Fellowship, a Berliner Künstlerprogramm stipendium in 1987 and the 2003 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers Residency. In 2005, he was invested as an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for Services to Literature and given a Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement. He is currently working on Volume Two of Shadbolt's life.